Taking Digital Notes
Tuesday, January 23rd 2007 | Ismael Ghalimi
Back in April 2001, I read a fascinating article written by Steve Silberman for Wired Magazine. It described a new technology developed by a Swedish company called Anoto. The technology allowed hand writing to be digitized by a micro-camera embedded into the tip of a pen when using paper layered with barely visible patterns. I played with an early version developed by Nokia, but the pen was too bulky to be used on a daily basis, so I decided to wait for the technology to mature a little bit more. It did, I tried it, and I’m glad to report that it actually works.
Recently, I came across PaperIQ, a British company that integrated a pen developed by Maxell with the BlackBerry Pearl. I have been using the system for a couple of months now, and I am really impressed. I use it to take notes on EASYBOOK notebooks made by OXFORD, upload my notes to my BlackBerry Pearl over Bluetooth by simply tapping onto a sticker affixed on the back of the notebook, and send them via email after they got automatically converted into text by PaperIQ’s online OCR service. Life-like copies are also made available on PaperIQ’s website in PDF format.
Overall, the technology works, and the workflow is almost perfect. What I like the most about it is that I can take notes during meetings without the intrusion of a laptop or Tablet PC. And because most of the notes I am taking are rich in diagrams, not having the advanced OCR capabilities offered by a Tablet PC does not appear to be an issue. In exchange, I get the best hand writing interface ever created: plain paper and a pen with real ink in it.
Moving forward, I would like to see some improvements to PaperIQ’s online service. First, it would be great to get PDF copies of my notes sent to an email address automatically. Second, I would love to get these files automatically stored onto an ECM system such as Koral. And I could get the later with the former when Koral adds an email interface to its application.
Entry filed under: Office 2.0
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Ismael,
This sounds good. I wonder how good it would be in terms of Chinese characters (simplified, traditional, and Unicode), and other non-european alphabets (middle-east and far-east) recognition.
Best regards,
-Francis
Ismael,
I’ve seen something similar from HP a couple of years ago, and I was impressed then. As you say, the pen was a bit chunky. The possibilities, when integrating with enterprise systems, really make sense, as the general population is still more comfortable with pen and paper.
Having looked at the OXFORD site, it looks like it would be great for me. I tend to have a small notebook for attending meetings. My Dell Pocket PC takes too much concentration when inputting lengthy notes.
The fact that you still have to use paper might put me off a little, as does the current investment and ongoing cost of consumables. If the price came down to something like $100-$150, I’d just go for it. Perhaps they could have a wipe clean version of the paper; might save a few trees…
-Bob
Ismael:
I will second Bob’s comment. A few years ago, I was using a Logitech pen with the OXFORD pad, and it was working great except the pen was really clunky, did not have Bluetooth, nor any other workflow features. If I remember correctly, the pen was fairly expensive (around $200-$250), and so were the pads (about $10 each).
The digital pen/paper is (has the potential to be) a fantastic tool, as it is the most natural data entry mechanism, but I sure wish prices and TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) were a bit lower.
As a sidenote, thanks for Koral. I began using it last week, and it’s working great so far. Have you ever tried JotSpot (now part of Google)? I think it is a great tool as well, in somewhat different ways than Koral.
-Ryan
Francis,
I did not try yet.
Best regards
-Ismael
Ryan,
My exposure to JotSpot has been fairly limited so far. I am eagerly waiting for the new release by Google to dive into it some more. I keep hearing great things about it.
Best regards
-Ismael
Hi Ismael,
This sounds very intriguing. Any chance you could take a video podcast of a simple workflow and upload it on YouTube? The OXFORD site does not seem to have a simple demo/tutorial.
Thanks, and all the best for 2007!
-Edwin
Edwin,
Great idea! Give me a couple of days.
And we should get together for coffee at Oracle one of these days…
Best regards
-Ismael
[…] Taking Digital Notes […]
Ismael,
Great article and summary on digital note taking.
Back in 2001, I was an early adopter of the Anoto SDK. I really thought there was some potential with their creative way of digitizing handwriting, and tried to build a product/service to integrate with email. Ultimately, the endeavor was a classic case of being too bleeding edge—the Nokia pen was too bulky; the more commercial Logitech IO was more usable, but lacked wireless capabilities, and the quality of the writing instrument (ink cartridge) wasn’t great considering the target audience would be looking for a great pen-to-paper experience.
Thanks for the link to PaperIQ—it looks like something we were trying to do 5 years ago, which was too early for the market. Personally, I have settled on my own blend of paper and computer-based note taking. For note taking on the fly I use Circa notebooks from Levenger, or the ultra-portable PicoPad. For notes that I want to keep around for a while, I summarize and tag into my own online notebook G. I find the transcription process a good way to get cathartic with the information. The only problem is I lose the doodles.
-Greg
Greg,
notebook G looks very interesting… Thanks for sharing!
Best regards
-Ismael
Ismael,
This looks like a very interesting product, and I’ll have to give it a try. It’s a little ironic that the technology finally seems to be getting there to be able to support this, but I would argue that the market for such a product has come and gone. I could certainly get a lot of value out of a product like this, but with the Tablet PC, Palmtops, or mini keyboards, today, my sense is that the masses would consider a digitizing pen passé. This feels like a market that could have been five years ago, but just didn’t quite make it, and possibly never will.
Jason,
Writing on paper is still a lot easier and faster than typing so I bet the masses (me being one of them) would welcome a pad that they can scribble on, and capture it electronically.
Voice recognition software is also a great input tool—I use Dragon and it works really great. One problem though—it seems to really aggravate my dog, and Dragon gets confused by barking!
-Ryan
Satori has been working with Anoto technology for about four years now. The Maxell pens are much smaller than the Logitech pens, for those who are concerned about chunkiness. It’s about the size of a Sharpie. Many people find that handwriting recognition doesn’t work quite as well as they want when applied to free-form notes. However it works quite well with forms, where there is implicit context. Satori Labs makes digital pen systems for healthcare applications.
-Roy
Roy,
Thanks for the feedback. I have the same experience using the pen. Free-form handwriting recognition is fairly poor, but all I care about is digital archiving of my notes. Form-based applications tend to work better indeed, and I find myself wishing that I could use some online application to develop custom forms, print them on Anoto paper, and link them to an online database like Dabble DB. For recording things like my dive logs or flight logs, it would be perfect!
Best regards
-Ismael
For those of you doing free-form notes, it’s worth noting that a company in France called VisionObjects has a remarkable technology called Ink Search that will search your handwritten notes for specified text. There’s a subtle but hugely important difference between this approach and searching already-recognized text: Ink Search will find words that were misrecognized in the converted text. Say you write “foobar”, and the recognition would convert this as “foobob”. Search for “foobar” will still find the notes, because it re-processes the ink, specifically looking for things that might be “foobar”. It’s awesome.
-Roy
Ismael,
Some of the improvements you are requesting have already been realised by XMS Penvision, one of the first companies to develop solutions enabling Anoto functionality in 2001. With the aNotes book, you can e-mail your notes as PDF directly. Through the Web interface you can also convert them into other file types, and export to various systems. Handwriting recognition is done through the VisionObjects technology described above.
Ismael,
I have a Blackberry Pearl also, and I just love it, even though it scratches easily and it is a bit fragile. I am using a program called SoonR for connectivity with my laptop, and it works great. It even allows me to use Skype. If you haven’t yet, maybe you should check it out when you get a chance, and let us know what you think.
Just a thought!
-Ryan
Have a look at magicomm. In their technology section, they have videos on how the pen and the paper work. It seems this company has been applying the technology to saving the UK police force CSI’s time and money. There is a video on this. It looks fantastic! They too have a notebook.
Carolina,
Thanks for the information. It looks really interesting indeed.
Best regards
-Ismael
Ryan,
I must try SoonR indeed. Give me a couple of weeks.
Best regards
-Ismael
David,
Thanks for the link. Their notebook looks really sharp.
Best regards
-Ismael
I would like to take this opportunity to announce the creation of Digital Pen Tips.
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