WORLD
Livescribe launches Sky wireless smartpen that syncs with Evernote
Baku, October 29 (AZERTAC). Livescribe keeps making its smartpens smarter. The company has created a pen that can capture writing, record audio, and then wirelessly transfer the captured data to a smartphone, tablet, or Evernote note-taking software on a PC. By doing so, the company makes it a lot easier to make use of and share notes from lectures that you’ve heard or meetings you’ve attended.
The Oakland, Calif.-based company is launching Sky, the first Wi-Fi-enabled digital pen that can transfer your data to cloud services, including synchronizing with Evernote, which has more than 40 million users. The new Sky wifi smart pen digitizes and records audio at the same timing, allowing consumers to capture everything they hear and write.
By moving handwritten work or recorded audio to Evernote, Livescribe makes it a lot easier to back up your important notes. Once the data has been securely stored on the cloud, it becomes easily searchable and can be played back, organized, and shared. The target audience is on-the-go people, from executives to students. Those individuals don’t have to choose between writing on paper or writing on a tablet, as the Sky smartpen allows them to write an image on paper and have that image appear automatically on a tablet.
With Livescribe, you write your notes on a special type of paper that records the strokes in digital form. That data is recorded on the smartpen’s flash memory drive, and when you use the pen to tap on the words later, you can play back the audio recording from that moment in the recording. That makes it easy to find the right spot you want to listen to in the captured audio.
Livescribe can also automatically transfer what you’ve written on paper to a tablet’s touchscreen. That makes sense because 54 percent of Livescribe users also have tablets. About 85 percent of tablet owners want to use those devices for notes, but only 13 percent say they are satisfied with tablets’ abilities to take notes, according to Livescribe’s own survey.
If you underline a word and then associate that word with an app, you can launch that piece of software in the future by tapping on the line. The pen also has a password feature so your data can remain private, and you can put your name on the display, making it easier for someone to return a pen to you if you lose it. With paper, writing is easy, flexible, and precise. But it’s easier to share, search, replay, and save on a tablet. Once in Evernote, the data is searchable and shareable.
Connell said the partnership with Evernote is a natural fit since 57 percent of Livescribe pen owners also use the note-taking software. Evernote allows you to take pictures of notes or other objects and then store them in a digital archive, which includes cloud storage for backup and access via a variety of devices. Rather than create such a solution itself, Livescribe decided it would partner with Evernote. Sky allows you to store 500 megabytes of monthly uploaded data, or 70 hours of recording time, for free. The Evernote sync can be set for automatic updating of material to the cloud storage.
Livescribe has sold at least a million units since its debut in 2008. The pen is the first major product release since the company launched its Echo smart pen in 2010. In September 2010, Livescribe raised $39 million in venture funding, and it has raised more than $100 million to date. Investors include Crosslink Capital, Scale Venture Partners, Qualcomm, TransLink Capital, Presidio Ventures, Keating Capital, and existing investors VantagePoint Venture Partners, Lionhart, and Aeris Capital. Michael Stark of Crosslink and Rory O’Driscoll of Scale will join Livescribe’s board. Livescribe’s technology is licensed from Anoto.