Uniting the Paper and Digital Worlds

Digital pen and paper technologies are proving increasingly popular in vertical markets such as health care and manufacturing, which make heavy use of standardized forms that can easily be produced on specialized paper. But the still-untapped frontier is the horizontal zone of everyday consumers. Within this vast and tempting territory resides the commercial digital pen's most-often targeted subgroup: notetakers - whether they're journalists, lawyers, or the many students who sit daily with their heads bobbing between their paper or computer notebooks and the lecturer at the podium. In the past year, several new digital pens have targeted this group in the hope of uniting the broader market's paper and digital worlds. And one digital pen - Livescribe's Pulse smartpen - is working out its grand vision of a paper-based mobile computing platform that it hopes will radically alter how we view pens and their possibilities.