I've played with one of these and they are pretty neat. As others have mentioned, most of the functionality relies on using special paper which is printed with patterns of dots. The paper doesn't look special though -- the dots are almost unnoticeable, and it's ordinary paper in texture and thickness etc.
The piano-playing functionality mentioned in the article really does work like magic -- draw keys, play keys, done.
In general though, I struggle to think of a reason I'd use it: I type much faster and more accurately than I write, and I seldom have any reason to be matching audio with text transcriptions.
Especially in a class where the professor has an unreasoning hatred of laptops.
But seriously. I bought one out of curiosity and played with it for a couple of days. But while I'd have killed for one during my university days, today I just reach for a keyboard. To get the most out of it, you need to carry around: (a) the Livescribe pen, (b) at least one notepad, and (c) the earbuds/microphones. And you need (d) the docking/charge cradle and (e) a laptop to synch with at the end of the day. If you need pen-based on-the-go note taking, why not buy a second hand Palm TX, or an HP iPaq 210? And if you don't like writing by hand, why are you bothering?
The killer use case for it is where you need to record an audio track synched to your handwriting. For lecture notes, it's a monumental and amazingly cool solution. For other applications, well, I'm still trying to think of one.
This is a really nice implementation of an idea that is undoubtedly great for some people ... just not for me.
Aside from school note taking and small meetings, is there any other purpose to this?
I'm trying to think of another scenario this would be useful.
It would be cool if this could do some basic Visio diagrams or something (even though I haven't used Visio in years).
This seems so darn cool, but I barely write anything by hand anymore. Just some basic design (layout, diagrams) and lists (groceries, supplies, to-do's, etc).
I could imagine this being useful for journalism--you're interviewing someone and recording the whole thing but taking notes about particularly interesting bits. Now it's easy to jump from the notes to the audio recording.
The business model of similar pens is selling the paper. Because the dots make each square inch globally unique, they are effectively selling - and making - real estate (a bit like ICANN selling domain names.)
I think this is unbelievably cool and clever - but I also really don't like it.
It is possible to print the paper at home, if you have a color laser printer. (600+ dpi required, but I haven't seen any lately that aren't at least 600.)
Newegg has printers that fit the bill starting at $150-ish. No special toner required, although Anoto does make some sort of custom ink you can buy for the purpose.
So it is possible to avoid buying their paper, just possibly annoying.
I was reminded of that bubble-era wired article as well. It's interesting to reread - I remember even at the time thinking it sounded a bit too breathless.
The first 'C-Pen' using the technique was launched in Sweden in 1998, internationally in 1999. Jim Marggraff's LiveScribe was formed in 2007, to create other products based on the technology -- following the successful 'pentop' product Marggraff created at LeapFrog using the paper.
Anoto is pretty damned cool and I've been tracking the products for a while. LeapFrog has 4-5 products using the tech now (the Tag family) and has cost reduced it significantly.
I guess Microsoft even considered it a threat to the point where they announced their own product as one of their amazing R&D discoveries, but quickly dropped any discussion of it.
The piano-playing functionality mentioned in the article really does work like magic -- draw keys, play keys, done.
In general though, I struggle to think of a reason I'd use it: I type much faster and more accurately than I write, and I seldom have any reason to be matching audio with text transcriptions.