Pens will have to be smart to survive

The pen might be mightier than the sword but it's unlikely to prove a match for the tablet and the smartphone, unless Livescribe realises its vision of a smart pen tightly integrated with smartphone and tablet.

 Apple CEO Tim Cook was reported in July saying that Apple had sold a million iPads into schools, adding: "The adoption rate of iPad in education is something I've never seen from any technology product in history. Usually education tends to be a fairly conservative institution in terms of buying, or K-12 does, and we're not seeing that at all on the iPad."

That report anticipated even greater sales should the then rumoured iPad mini materialise.

There are plenty of arguments against this trend: the cost, the rapid obsolescence of any IT devices, the Apple walled garden, but you don't need to be a rocket scientist to see that the days of the text book and the school exercise book are numbered.

What then of handwriting? Will today's kindergarten generation grow up seeing the act of making marks on paper as some weird practice that their grandparents indulged in?

Not if Smartpen manufacturer Livescribe has its way. And it claims that, today at least, there is no sign that the tablet takers are going penless: a survey of 600 of them said they look lots of notes (54 percent; that these were important (88 percent) and that it was important to get them onto the tablet or smartphone (85 percent).

81 percent said they took notes on their tablets but only 15 percent were "very satisfied" with this process. Sixty nine percent had bought a stylus to take notes with on their tablet with, but only 13 percent were very satisfied with this experience

The Livescribe Smartpen is a brilliant piece of technology that captures and digitises the act of making marks on paper and synchronises these with whatever sounds were being picked up by its inbuilt digital voice recorder.

In its first incarnations - the Pulse and Echo Smartpens - are great for taking notes and making recording for your later use, for archiving and for sharing with others - by connecting the pen to a computer via a USB connection - but these recordings sound/notes files are largely stand-alone.

By adding WiFi connectivity to itslatest model, the Sky Smartpen, Livescribe has done much more than replace that USB cable with a wireless link. It has created the potential for tight integration between handwriting, tablets (and PCs and smartphones) and their files and applications: a potential that it intends to enable others to exploit via a software development kit.

As a journalist I'm eagerly awaiting one early app that was demonstrated at the launch of the Sky Smartpen. It lets you scroll through a pdf document on the tablet, make notes on paper with the Smartpen and then return to that part of the PDF by simply touching the pen onto the note. Or you can add the notes to the pdf.

Many times have I had to peruse a couple of hundred pages of a report looking for key points around which to weave a news story. This would make that process so much easier.

Another application enables a teacher to receive in real time the output of all the students in the their class, when each is using a Smartpen to answer questions displayed on a tablet.

An application hinted at to me by Livescribe founder Jim Marggraff a couple of years ago would let you purchase goods online simply by writing 'buy [title]' and then responding to a message from, say, Amazon on the pen by writing your signature.

Neat, and for many today useful, but someone that has grown up with tablets and smartphones would likely see this process as old-fashioned. Why muck around writing when you can simply push a few buttons on a touch screen?

Livescribe's vision is world-changing, that "Every person who uses a pen today will be using a Smartpen in the future as an integral part of their digital life."

Every person might be a tough call, but I can certainly see the generations that grew up before the smartphone and the tablet taking to the technology in droves. The real challenge will be ensure that every one growing up today will keep using a pen and for that pen to be a smartpen. That I believe will be a much bigger challenge.

Visa has just announced that, from April 1, 2013 all Visa card transactions will have to be approved by customers using PINs instead of signatures in a bid to reduce fraud. A sign - excuse the pun - of things to come?

This article first appeared on iTWire, Australia's leading independent IT&T news and information source.