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Pencasting with the Pulse Smartpen at E3
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Best part? Works on a Mac or a PC.
This is going to be a little bit of a social experiment. If you have been following this over the past few weeks, you would know that we ran a couple of pieces pertaining to this new social media phenomenon called Pencasting.
For those of you who are not up on the times, there was quite a debate about whether or not the University of Missouri’s journalism department was in the right when they decided to “require” their incoming students this fall to purchase an iPhone or an iTouch.
Their plans may have changed with the introduction of the new iPhone 3G S, who knows.
Pertaining to the same argument, a few readers chimed in with a couple of alternatives that might better serve students in the classroom and the overwhelming favorite was a pen. Not just any pen, but one that can record audio that syncs up to notes you put on paper which additionally allows you to upload those notes and accompanying audio to share with friends, co-workers or family members.
If you missed the earlier feature, this little slice of technological heaven is Livescribe’s Pulse Smartpen.
In order to back up claims that this really could be beneficial to not only students in class but for people in the workplace too, we took the pen to E3 and put it into action.
Now obviously, we were kind of learning as we went so apologies to those out there that have already mastered the Smartpen. By the end however, using it started to become second nature and covering E3 without it would have been much more troublesome.
It was quite curious to find that even while being at an event promoting electronics, tons of people came up to us and asked why we had headphones attached to a pen that we were seemingly just using to jot down notes in a regular looking notepad.
They had absolutely no clue.
Needless to say, after we explained what it was, countless people said that they were going to be looking to pick one up after the show ended.
Let’s make a few disclaimers before we get to the Pencast itself.
Trying to learn how to use this thing on the fly is probably never a good idea to begin with, but this just being an example of the power of the Smartpen, you should be able to get a good idea.
Developers and PR representatives talk a mile a minute about their products and because we needed as much information as possible for our pieces, the handwriting looks like it might have been done by somebody first learning to write. Meaning, the notes were written at a furious pace.
In actuality, we could have just put one word attached to the audio and it would have been sufficient, again, you probably get it.
Ok, let’s get to it.
What you are about to see is only one of about 15 pages of notes and interviews that we conducted over the course of the three days at the show. This one in particular is with Rick White, the CMO (Chief Marketing Officer for the unfamiliar) of Fusion-io and maker of the ioXtreme, a product that we thought had the ‘Most Potential’ at E3 in a wrap-up piece.
Interview with Fusion-io at E3
brought to you by Livescribe
What you are observing are the notes, jotted down Livescribe's Dot Paper notebook and taken during the interview. If you click a sentence with your mouse, you will notice that the text also has accompanying audio that was recorded with headphones capable of getting 3D sound as well as cancelling out a lot of the background noise.
You can imagine E3 was extremely loud, so this was essential.
So, think about it.
Put yourself in the student’s shoes. While it may look silly (and I certainly got some odd glances), the Pulse Smartpen is an extremely useful weapon in school. You only have to write a few words and you get what the lecturer or professor is saying.
From there, you can upload it to all of your slacker or sick friends that missed class.
Same goes for the workplace. You might be in a meeting and instead of having to write a mile-a-minute, you can simply scribble a word and get the rest picked up on audio. From there, you could send it to a colleague that wasn’t there or might be travelling overseas. It will save a bunch of time and a bunch of headaches in the process.
If you head to Livesribe’s website and check out the community, there are tons of different kinds of Pencasts that are publically viewable making the possibilities with the Smartpen virtually endless.
Will Pencasting catch on? It is hard to tell but judging by the amount of people at E3 who had no idea what it was, hopefully more and more people realize that it is an incredible way to obtain and share information whether you are in the classroom or conducting tons of interviews at an electronics expo.
For more info about E3 and Pencasting: Contact Adam: admillios@gmail.com
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