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"   Today at DEMO, a technology showcase in Palm Desert, Calif., a company named Livescribe unveiled its new Pulse Smartpen. The Pulse is a fully functioning 1.3-ounce writing instrument with computing power built in and up to 2 GB of flash memory onboard. If the idea seems familiar to the LeapFrog Fly pen, that&amp;#039;s no coincidence. Jim Marggraff, who developed the Fly pen, is the founder and CEO of Livescribe (he left LeapFrog on amicable terms). But while the Fly pen is a highly sophisticated children&amp;#039;s toy\u2014using voice feedback and infrared-camera-based handwriting tracking, the Fly helps kids learn math, music and language skills\u2014the Pulse is a far more sophisticated, transformative product. Like the Fly, the Pulse uses an onboard camera to track user&amp;#039;s handwriting and page position by examining a tiny dot pattern on special paper. Unlike the Fly, the Pulse has an integrated microphone that can be used to record lectures, depositions, interviews, etc.   Why is this so transformative? Because by associating an audio stream with handwriting, the Pulse can fundamentally change the process of taking notes. Here&amp;#039;s how it works: If I am, for example, taking notes in a biology class, or recording an eyewitness account of a crime for a newspaper article, or taking minutes of a boardroom meeting, I would tap the printed record button that&amp;#039;s found at the bottom of each page of the Pulse&amp;#039;s special paper. Then, as I write on the page, the time code of the audio recording that the pen is picking up is matched up to the marks and words I write with the pen. When the conversation is complete, I tap the printed stop button at the bottom of the page, and then as I review my notes, I can tap on any word I&amp;#039;ve written and instantly cue up that part of the audio conversation. It&amp;#039;s called Paper Replay, and it&amp;#039;s an incredibly simple tool that takes seconds to learn. Yet it is capable of more sophisticated functionality. Any recording can be uploaded to a computer with the handwriting file associated to it. Livescribe is also setting up an online community where every registered user gets 250 MB of space to post and share recorded notes as a Flash file or PDF.   And recording is not limited to audio. Drawings can be recorded as well, then played back as a movie that shows the progress of your illustration. Plus, many functions similar to those of the Fly pen can be found on the Pulse. Put the Pulse in its calculation mode and you can simply write out a math problem; the answer will be displayed on its small but highly readable OLED screen. Livescribe has already released a software developer kit to encourage third parties to create applications for it. I tried a translation program under development that took my written English words and translated them to Spanish on the OLED screen and spoke the words over the Pulse&amp;#039;s onboard speaker. By writing several key sentences on paper in English, I could carry my notepad around with me while on vacation and tap out each word in the sentences to speak with locals. Since the Pulse is essentially a new computing platform, there are countless potential applications not yet thought up that will probably evolve from the community of users and developers.   And that community is likely to be fairly large, since the barrier to entry on the Pulse is low. A 1 GB version holds 100 hours of audio and costs $150, and a 2 GB version costs $200 for double the capacity. Marggraff tells me that pads of paper for the Livescribe should be cost-competitive with normal paper, but if you aren&amp;#039;t interested in buying special pads, it can be printed using most inkjet printers. Furthermore, since the tiny dot paper technology that the Pulse uses can be integrated into the printing process, several books will be printed on this paper, including a Bible and a birding journal that will work interactively with the Pulse pen.   Perhaps I&amp;#039;m a bit biased toward the technology, since as a journalist, I&amp;#039;ve been taking notes during interviews with subjects for years, and I&amp;#039;ve spent hundreds of dollars on a succession of pocket recorders and hundreds more hours of my time transcribing the recordings these devices have made. If only I had known that all that time, my pen could have been doing the work for me.\u2014Glenn Derene Livescribe with accessories Livescribe infrared camera tip Livescribe OLED display "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a4683/4246851/>