A Wonder Smartpen: Sky WiFi Pen Can Draw User Interfaces on Paper
If we go back to the starting of this month October 2012, Then a innovative smartpen making company Livescribe discovered an interesting product a stylus smartpen that records speech and handwritten notes, in addition to drawing user interfaces on paper and “speaking” back to owners. Sky WiFi takes things further.
The Livescribe paper-based computing platform founded in January 2007 consists of a digital pen, digital paper, software applications, and developer tools.
Central to the Livescribe platform is the smartpen, a ballpoint smartpen with an embedded computer and digital audio recorder. When we used it with Anoto digital paper, it records what it writes for later uploading to a computer, and synchronizes those notes with any audio it has recorded. This allows users to replay portions of a recording by tapping on the notes they were taking at the time the recording was made. It is also possible to select which portion of a recording to replay by clicking on the relevant portion of a page on-screen, once it has been synced to the Livescribe Desktop software.
Anoto Group is a Swedish technology company which has invented, developed and licensed a product line of digital pens and a product suite to manage information capturing utilizing these.
In a brief, the Sky WiFi stylus is the Echo smartpen with integrated wireless connectivity, allowing users to preserve notes and related audio files online, by accessing WiFi networks and depositing files in the cloud.
This smartpen only has a 2 GB internal memory,so this 2 GB can be useful when attending multiple classes or meetings one after another. On November 1, 2012 is when sales of the basic 2 GB Sky pen will start, for the price of $170 / 131-170 Euro, but there will be 4 GB ($200 / 154-200 Euro) and 8 GB ($250 / 193-250 Euro) versions shipping by the end of the year.
The Echo Smartpen will keep selling in the meantime, for much less, but it will be gone from the market by the end of 2013.
We should probably mention that the info on the Sky pen isn’t stored locally. While a notebook can receive the data, files are actually stored on an Evernote account, which can later be accessed by any PC, tablet or smartphone. At some point in the near future, Dropbox, Facebook and Google Drive will become potential storage databases for Sky WiFi as well.
Overall, there does not seem to be much point to purchasing any of the higher-capacity pens, since cloud storage holds everything. Then again, buying an 8 GB stylus does net customers a year’s subscription to Evernote Premium, which normally costs $45 / 35-45 Euro.
Livescribe chairman and CEO Gilles Bouchard said:
“With the Sky wifi smartpen, they can easily capture important ideas, presentations and conversations in the most natural way, on paper, and they automatically appear right where they want them – on their mobile devices and personal computers,”
