When the fall college semester starts, some students will be taking notes with a pen that listens. Even those sitting in the lecture hall's back row sneaking looks at their email or social network Web pages won't miss a word claims Livescribe, Inc. (DEMO 08), makers of the Pulse Smartpen, which begins selling nationally July 13 at Target, Target.com, Amazon.com, and about 150 Douglas Stewart bookstores on major college campuses. And of course on Livescribe's Web site.
"We think this is especially relevant for college freshmen, who are adjusting to a new level of academic rigor and challenges at school," said Eric Petitt, Livescribe's director of marketing. "It ends stress of feeling overwhelmed. This is a great product to give those college first year’s an edge. It's great for grad students doing research. The benefits for journalism majors are obvious, as with lawyers to be, with all the information they need to cram in their brains daily. Anyone who needs “total recall” – and wants to be able to capture information and access it efficiently later, can benefit."
Digital pens of varying functionality and drawbacks have been around since the early 1990s. Logitech came out with its first IO pen six years ago. In the past two years, a handful companies have introduced different types of digital pens that record handwriting. Last July, Leapfrog Enterprises introduced FlyFusion, its second attempt at a digital pen. Livescribe CEO Jim Marggraff was a top executive at Leapfrog from 1998 to 2005 where he invented the LeapFrog FLY Pentop computer and the LeapPad computer device.
The digital pen field is crowded. Dane-Elec markets its ZPen and Iogear sells the Mobile Digital Scribe, which works tethered to a Windows-based computer. Nokia, EPOS Technologies, Yanko Design, Hitatchi, and Digital Ink sell pens that to varying degrees make handwriting digital.
Unlike its competitors, Livescribe's Pulse records audio and accepts third-party software. The company in January received $23.2 million in Series A funding from VantagePoint Venture Partners.
Marggraff's Oakland, CA start-up spent 18 months with students at UC Berkeley and other colleges learning the vagaries of how people take notes and the acoustics of lecture halls where professors' voices echo and mumble. They found that people who spend a long time taking notes tend to jot down only 15 words a minute, so they miss most of what's spoken.
Various academic studies have shown that note taking is cognitively challenging - often taking the same mental exercise as experts playing chess. As many students can attest one's ability to take thorough and accurate notes often has a direct relationship on getting good grades. A University of Tennessee doctoral candidate's study (year 2000) found the quality of note taking is more predictive of overall undergraduate course performance than either class attendance or critical thinking skills. In 2003, an International Journal of Human-Computer Studies article reported that on average, a person takes twice as long to take notes with a computer than with pencil and paper.
Livescribe claims its smart pen hears what you do - sorting out the professor's voice from the audience's paper rustling - even when students sit in a lecture hall's uppermost rows. The Pulse comes with a headset equipped with binaural microphones equipped with noise-cancelling technology to pick up in stereo what you hear, like a lecturer's voice, while blocking ambient noises. "The audio recording capability is on par with higher end consumer digital voice recorders from Olympus and Sony," Petitt said.
The Pulse comes in $149 one-gigabyte/100 audio hours and $199, two-gigabyte/200 audio hours models in anodized aluminum. Built around a Samsung processor, this computer-in-a-pen requires special dotted paper that works with a miniscule infrared camera on its tip to record 75 images a second - tracking what you write, even your doodles. When you tap the pen on this paper embedded with an invisible micro-scatter pattern, made and licensed by the Anoto Group of Sweden.The pen's recorder finds that spot on the recording and plays back what your scribbled. (Livescribe's CEO Marggraff spent four months as Anoto's CEO in between his Leapfrog and Livescribe jobs.)
Those who doddle while taking notes may appreciate that the Pulse captures their sketches, and once uploaded to a computer doodles become animated Flash files that can be posted to a social network profile and sent to friends.
The pen comes with a 100-sheet, college-ruled notebook of the custom paper. Livescribe and its retail partners sell the special dot paper and accessories, including a leather case ($24.95), two-pack journals ($24.95), a four-pack of notebooks ($19.95), and a five-pack of ink cartridges ($5.95). Livescribe and Hartley & Marks Publishers, creators of the Paperblanks series of journals, are will offer dot-enabled journals later this year. Livescribe plans on offering three-subject notebooks popular with students later this year.
Early reviews of the Livescribe Pulse complained it can't record handwriting on any kind of paper. Livescribe will offer free "print-your-own" dot paper from its Web site later this year. "We're not trying to squeeze people on the paper," Petitt said. "It's critical that our price points are comparable to the paper you're already buying."
Using a USB connection, you can transfer the pen's audio recording to a personal computer running the Windows XP or Vista operating systems so it can be saved, shared, annotated, and searched. Once downloaded to a computer, a recording can be listened to at varying speeds. Macintosh computer users with Apple’s Boot Camp software can also use the pen.
"We are working aggressively on a native Mac version, and are planning release of the Livescribe Desktop for Mac by the end of 2008," Petitt said. "All (our) smart pens today are forward-compatible for the Mac, so if you are planning to buy a Mac in next few months, you’ll be able to use your current smart pen with a future Mac."
Livescribe won't say how many Pulse Smartpens a factory in China is making for its first national retail push. It is the midst of launching a viral marketing strategy by hiring 50 college student "scribes" to help evangelize to the 17 million U.S. college student market.
Livescribe recently hired John Carter as chief technology officer. Several years ago, he was chief engineer of Bose Corp., known for its high-quality stereo speaker and headset acoustics and noise-cancelling technology. Most recently, Carter was CEO of TCGen, a boutique advisory firm. He also has worked as the chief technology officer of Klipsch Audio (funded by Livescribe's backer VantagePoint Venture Partner), and was CEO of NetLens (acquired by NextPage). He founded Boston-based Product Development Consulting Inc. (PDC), a leading organization in advising Fortune 500 companies including Cisco, Tektronics, 3M, and IBM on research, development, and marketing.
About 1,000 developers have downloaded the open source Livescribe Penlet SDK beta to create language translators, games, and other applications. As a demonstration of potential, the Pulse can translate about 20 written English words into Arabic, Spanish, Swedish, or Mandarin. The pen doesn't yet output audio yet, but Livescribe plans on offering this functionality as a free enhancement later this year, Petitt said.
Early adopters are uploading their Pulse audio notes, what Livescribe calls "pencasts," on Livescribe's community Web page. Pulse-recorded audio notes and animated doodles on people's social network Web pages can't be far behind.
