Can You Improve on a Pen? Livescribe Sure Thinks So

Jim Marggraff, the CEO of Livescribe, creators of the newest digital pen, called Smartpen, is a pen evangelist. He has a passion for turning a pen into the ultimate computing input device. His last job at LeapFrog culminated in the creation of the FlyPen, LeapFrog's technically impressive but commercially lackluster pen for kids. It was used with special Fly paper that the pen could read.

Moving from the kids' market to the business market, Marggraff is about to launch the Smartpen—a full computer applications platform for people who like the random access features of print.

"Paper and pen are the world's best unstructured tools," says Marggraff. "It's the way that people think best." The SmartPen is a bit larger than your normal pen. It houses a special infrared camera capable of taking quick photos in succession. Inside the pen are specially placed microphones and speaker. On the outside is an OLED display to tell you what mode you're in at the moment.

Put the pieces together, and you've got one smart pen, capable of doing what no pen has ever done before. One of the most innovative features is called Paper Replay which lets your written text tag an audio recording. Imagine that you're sitting in a college lecture hall or at a business meeting and information is flying at you fast. You're taking notes and hoping you'll remember what you wrote by the time you next look at your notes. With the Smartpen you can record the session with pen's built-in audio and take notes with it using the pen and dot paper. The words become tags that let you go back and listen to the salient information. Tap on "Budgets 2009" in your handwriting, for example, and you'll go directly to that part of the audio recording. The written terms become keywords for accessing content.

There are other ways to use the pen as well. Write the word "SOLVE" followed by an equation and the pen will solve it. Write "TRANSLATE" or "DEFINE" and the pen will act accordingly on whatever follows next.

Livescribe has opened up its applications environment so that others can create different sorts of Smartpen applications. The dot paper, which used to be one of the chief problems with older generations of pens, is now inexpensive enough (it costs he same or nearly the same as regular paper) and can be created on your printer.

The pen is slated for release within the next two months and will cost less than $200. Pens have gone through lots of maturation. From quills to ballpoint to pens that write through grease, but Smartpen may be the biggest thing that's happened to the pen since the advent of the computer. SmartPen is the pen for high tech times.