The Prosthetic Pen for Less
A surprise from Livescribe smartpen. Maybe more than one… The pen’s been selling at Target, a strange place for sophisticated tech tastes. The other surprise? Until now, smartpen has held its price point — $100/gig. But, yesterday, at Target I discovered at 20 percent price drop. The two-gig pen now sells for $160. While that’s good, I wonder what it means. For a long time, the pen’s price was inviolable. It cost the same at Amazon, Target, name-your-discounter. That gave me confidence in the company, because when a business maintains terms for all comers that signifies strength and stability. Considerable Apple. No one discounts their products. Interestingly, the price at the Livescribe store hasn’t budged. It’s holding at $100 per gig. While there are deals on pre-packs, they are the sort of deals you might see at Amazon, package deals: pen, notes pads, extra refills on sale for $225. Maybe Target realizes they are not the place for leading edge technical prosthetics and they’re clearing out inventory. eBay people might bite on that one.
What’s going on? This pen is hot and evolving. But the pace of innovation can be telling. Look at the growth of apps for the iPhone/iPod. With 25-thousand apps in January, Flurry says that the apps numbered 65-thousand in July. There’s a message in those numbers. Interest. Opportunity. Success! The public is on fire. Not at Livescribe. They need to get the developer community churning.
They could start with notepads. Humble but powerful. The standard notebook that comes with the pen is fine, but a variety of note taking notebooks would be … value added, a little spice in the process. I already break up the page in a modified Cornell Notes style, as I take notes with the smartpen. How about a notebook with no lines, but grids for notes, summaries and questions? The good news is that there’s already buzz among developers about moving to a new line of notepads… But is it real?
A small moleskin-style notebook would be great for the smartpen. A natural. The neat little notebooks on sale now are too thick and clunky for quick-draw writers and note takers.
On the other hand, the pen is not exactly fast on the draw, either. It’s big, which suggests a modified smartpen of the future. A whole new line. How about a smart pen with one flat side to keep it from rolling off the table? In classrooms, many desks are slanted for comfort. That can be dangerous for a delicate $200 writing device.
Or what about microphones. I did an interview the other day in a noisy restaurant. Ambient noise can be a problem for the pen. I got around the loud music and louder clientele by using the smartpen’s earphone/microphones like a lavaliere mic, planting them just next to my subject’s fork. It worked great. But why not a lavaliere mic for the smartpen? Add a little Bluetooth device to the pen and connect it through a Bluetooth mic… Farewell unsightly wires. Professionals like me would pay for add-ons that make work easier and more accurate. There are probably dozens of ways to modify existing pens to employ Bluetooth… But any kind of microphone that plugged into the pen would do.
Users like me want to see energy and stability from brilliant and innovative companies with products like the smartpen… And I’m watching for signs.
Prosthetic Pen?
So which statement is most accurate? A smartpen is an intellectual prosthetic. A smartpen is more flexible than a computer. A smartpen redefines non-linear organization. Roll the tape (and don’t forget to click the back button to read the rest of the blog!): The Livescribe paper-based computing platform
I just bought smartpen number two from livescribe for my son who begins high school in two weeks. Smartpen number one is mine. Bet on that. I use it for teaching and for interviewing.
Here’s the deal. Say you’re in a lecture, and you whip out your smartpen. Naturally, you begin taking notes. Your smartpen uses “special” paper (same price as “regular” paper), which allows the pen to simultaneously capture every word on the page as the pen’s microphone records every word in the lecture. Or, in my case, the interview. Back at your desk, you slip the pen into its “cradle,” and everything flows into a free software package. Now for the magic.
Every word in your funky handwritten notes is searchable! Pulse smartpen from Livescribe
And more, if you don’t understand those inky gobs others call your handwritten notes, there’s remedy. You simply touch the pen to the scrambled words and the pen replays the lecture/interview from the garbled blob of cursive in question. Word! Watch how University of Kansas professor, cool Mike Wesch and his class, use the pen: SmartPen as Digital Ethnography Tool
This is serious stuff with lots of opportunities for those in search of intellectual prosthetics, and we haven’t begun to address the opening questions raised by this blog. Not to mention one or two improvements and a problem-O…
To be continued…
