Nokia Buys Symbian - Donates to Open Source Business

In what can only be good news for Digital Pen users around the world, Nokia has recently bought all the shares in the Symbian operating system that it did not already own, and will contribute that to a new not-for-profit open source organisation called the Symbian Foundation.

Others joining the Symbian Foundation will include Sony-Ericsson, Motorola, AT&T, LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone.

The significance of this is that the Symbian Foundation will allow the Symbian mobile O/S to be open source allowing all players to develop devices based on the Symbian system.

From a digital pen providers point of view, this is good news indeed as the more widely accessabile Symbian is, the more likely it is to be used on a larger range of phones and mobile devices.

The Symbian OS in our opinion is the best for digital pen applications and products as it allows full customisation of the router application that we install on the phone, and allows us to perform functions such as autostart that are not supported on Java O/S phones.

You can read a more detailed article here.

Anoto buys the Covelus Routing Technology Source Code

A press release from Covelus (digital pen & paper router developers) today.

It appears that Anoto is bringing a lot of third party technology back in house. My guess would be that this is a better solution for them to control the licensing of their technology. By controlling as many parts of the chain as possible they will undoubted have the ability to ensure that people are not taking `shortcuts’ when it comes to their licensing.

“Today we are announcing the sale of all their Routing Technology source code to Anoto AB.

Covelus Router and CCS will no longer be available for purchase or support from Covelus, but instead all related enquiries should be directed to Anoto from today.

This agreement is seen as the perfect solution for Covelus, Anoto and the partner network moving forward.

Anoto will continue to run the hosted CCS for 6 months from now, whilst they package a new router offering. In that 6 month period, there will be no charge for any mapping licences (both hosted & standalone customers) - they will be free, and instead Anoto will sell pen hardware/licences in the same way as normal.

Please email product.inquiry@anoto.com with any questions.

Covelus wish you the best of luck with your digital pen projects in the future.”

Digital Pens & iPhones

Vodaphone and Apple this week announced that they will work together to deliver the iPhone into Australia (and 9 other countries). As you can see by their press release, there is not a lot of information. So at this stage it is unknown as to when the iPhone will be available in Australia.

For us, that means that we will start to see more enquiries from people who want to use an iPhone with their digital pen. So where do we stand with the ability to support iPhone when they are released?

As far as we are aware, no one in the Anoto digital pen world has yet developed a router for the iPhone to send the digital forms. The primary reason for this is the lack of numbers of these phones in the market (Steve Jobs goal is to have 10 million iPhones out by years end) combined with the fact that most iPhones are being used in the consumer market, whereas the main digital pen market space is for business.

But, Apple has their sights set on making the iPhone a serious contender to the likes of Blackberry, Windows Mobile and Symbian based phones (all of which have digital pen routers available) by reaching out to corporate users. At a recent event Apple announced the `corporate wishlist’ they working on to help sway decision making in their favour for corporate and business phones. Most notable of these that I think will help with corporate users is the support for Microsoft Exchange. Apple will license ActiveSync to allow access to users corporate e-mail, this combined with the global contacts list and push e-mail will make it a serious contender in the business world.

If (or more likely, when) the business and corporate uptake of the iPhone increases, then we will have cause to write a router for the iPhone - until then it remains a nice toy that I look forward to getting when they are available here in Australia.

Brad

Quickies - New Post-it-note

Here is an interesting use of a digital pen technology. Turning the old post-it-note into a digital format so you can store them and sort them on the computer as well as sync with Outlook for reminders etc. The quicky sticky note also includes an RFID tag so that you can locate an item - this is a pretty unique and useful feature (depending on the range of course) - check that out in the video clip.

At a quick look it appears to use a cabled clipboard to capture the writing. I would guess that it uses something along the lines of a proximity Bluetooth detector - similar to the EPOS digital pen system.It seems like a nice little product, but I feel that it is fairly limited in it’s uses, capturing such a small amount of real estate means that it is useful for just snippets of information as opposed to full pages of handwriting or form data.You can see more here.

Datateq Moves in (At Last)

Last week we finally moved into our new office at Norwest Business Park.

There was a delay of quite a few months thanks to an oversight by the developer who then had some issues getting the occupancy certificate from council.

Anyway, we are now fully moved in and have had the new developers PC’s and servers delivered. They are busy assembling all of that right now. We are going to see some great productivity gains from them now as they are all going to be working off dual 24″ wide screen monitors - there they will be able to see more code than you can poke a stick at!

We are now located at 10/16 Lexington Drive, Norwest Business Park, Bella Vista, NSW.

Datateq Launches Live Support Chat

Datateq launches Support Chat in a all live applications.

It’s a great implementation, because we do offer clients LIVE support on every technical question, like router installation problems, paring your pen with your mobile phone and much more. We offer this service to normal business hours (Eastern Standard Time (Sydney).

We have added a new Support Chat menu item to the main navigation bar of pages in all client sites, that wayit is always present everywhere you go on the site.

The Chat link gives the client access to our support staff via a dedicated chat window, on demand from the client end. When the chat window `pops up’ the client simply needs to enter some information, such as Name, Email, Company and the technical support question they would like to ask us. After the client submits this information, they will be connected straight into our chat line and one of our support staff will get in contact with the client promptly.

It’s a huge improvement in part of supporting our clients in several ways. Via the chat support we are able to send images, url’s, and other files if necessary.

This service is important for us to provide easy access support options for a wide range of our clients.
We hope that the Chat function will be used as often as necessary from our clients and we look forward to provide them with the best support as we can.

Patricia

Introducing Patricia Hoffmann

You may remember in late February we were advertising to find a new Web Developer, and I am pleased to announce that two weeks ago we hired a bright young woman to join our tech and development team.

Patricia has excellent skills in web development in the ASP .NET Framework and also has a sharp eye for graphic design and page, that combined with a true desire to learn and to build excellent product applications means that she is the perfect for our team.

Patricia’s role within Datateq will be twofold:

1. Systems Development - where she will work closely with the rest of the Datateq team on building product applications and solutions for the digital pen market.
2. Technical Support - where she will support new client installs and on-going clients, and in particular Patricia will become our in house resident expert for all things router and mobile phone based.

I hope you can also welcome her to the team.

 Brad

World’s Biggest Compute Job Done by Pen & Paper

I read a very interesting article this morning from ZDNet, the article was called “World’s Biggest Compute Job … to be Done by Pen & Paper”

The premise of the article is the fact that the US Census Bureau, after 10 years, has not been able to get their hand held computing device sufficiently usable in order to undertake the 2010 census. The cost for running the 2010 census has blown out by US$3 billion to US$14 billion due to the fact that they now need to recruit and train some 600,000 additional temporary staff to undertake the census - using pen and paper.

A big failing of the hand held computer they are using is that it proved too complex for the temporary staff to use.

Now, I don’t know what they are using as a hand held computing device, but it must be some form of PDA (Update: there is an image of the PDA being used here). From experience, it takes at least 15 hours of training to get a person comfortable using a PDA, longer if the person is unskilled. PDA’s also have serious limitations when it comes to battery life. I imagine that the average temporary census worker is not greatly computer savvy which is going add huge burdens to the support staff, and I also imagine that they are going to be out door to door for many hours at a time - how will they keep doing that with the power source?

Now it appears that they will mostly be abandoning the hand held computer, called an enumerator, and reverting back to pen & paper.

Now you might call me biased, but it appears to me that the very fact that they have trained staff going door to door writing things down and needing to get that data quickly back into a database lends itself perfectly to a digital pen & paper solution.

The temporary staff are already trained in filling the form, the only additional training requirement for them to use a digital pen & paper solution is to tick `send’ when they have finished filling in a form.

Once they tick send, they have finished their part, the mobile router takes care of the rest and sends the data through the mobile phone GPRS network back to the processing servers. This is encrypted for secure transmission. Additionally the GPS co-ordinates can be taken as the data passes through the mobile routing device, giving certainty that the census form was completed at the correct address.

The battery will last at least several days, most likely a week, in a digital pen being used intensively.

There is complete redundancy inherent in a digital pen & paper solution. Using the hand held computer, if it breaks, gets lost, runs out of juice etc - it is useless and there is absolutely nothing that can be done to fill in the census data. On the other hand with a digital pen solution, if the pen is lost, breaks etc, you can keep on filling in the forms with a 20cent biro. Then later when it is back in the collection center we can write over the pen marks again with a digital pen and bring it back into the system.

Writing with pen & paper is less intrusive and makes people feel more comfortable than sitting there with someone tapping away on a keyboard or tapping a screen with a plastic pretend pen.

A system like this could be deployed at a lower overall cost due to the commercial availability of the pen and the greatly reduced training and support burden of the technology.

Maybe for the 2020 census they US Census Bureau may realise that yes, digitally collecting and collating census data is the only way, but they may also realise that this is possible with the tried and true pen & paper.

Some other links regarding the 2010 census.

Computer World

CNN

Washington Post

101 Uses for Digital Pen & Paper Technology

The digital pen & paper technology is still pretty new and still has a long way to go in terms of market penetration, that’s why I always love doing a demo to someone who has not see the pens before usually rattle off a few ideas of how the digital pen could be used to benefit different people and industries.

So for those of you out there who would like to see a few ideas on how the digital pen can be implemented to help your business or profession, have a look at this list:

Serviced Based Businesses

• Service reports - bring them back to the office in real time, keep your techs out on the road and improve your billable hours.
• Time sheets - ever struggle to get time sheets back from your guys out in the field? If they fill in a daily or weekly timesheet, it can be back in the office before your payroll staff even need them.
• Purchase orders - get your field staff completing purchase orders and and get a purchase order back to them in seconds.

Sales Force

• Complete order forms on site, have it sent in real time so that the order can be processed whilst the rep is still on-site. Maybe even have an automated system that sends an sms to the rep while they are still on-site stating when the delivery will be or what items are on back order.
• Complete an invoice and have it return to the office to update the accounting system without the need for data entry. Accept payment and note the account number, cheque number or even credit card number.
• Update your company’s CRM system while sitting with a new client - all by writing on a note pad.

Law Enforcement

• Ticketing - council parking offices, police, university parking offices, rangers - any form of infringement notification enforcement where a ticket or fine applies. Simply write on your note pad and send the data back to the processing centre - no need for data entry. Photos of the infringement can also be captured & sent by a compatible mobile phone.
• Reporting - Police always write in their little notebooks then retype their incident report when they are back in the station - imagine being able to write on a notebook which automatically populates the report fields saving hours a week of retyping. Saving police time in their reporting can give them more time in the field.

Students

• Perfect tool for note taking. Write down everything that you need and automatically transfer the notes to a Word document when you return home. This saves lugging around a laptop or tablet PC and also saves the stress when the battery of said laptop or tablet PC runs out.

Professionals

• As with students, it too is a perfect and unobtrusive note taking device. Typing away on a laptop in a meeting is a bit intrusive and often not the best way to interact. Writing with a pen on some paper is polite and unobtrusive. You get the same result at the end of the day - an electronic editable file that you can work with.
• E-mail. You can also send e-mail from a piece of paper. That’s right - using your digital pen and special Datateq notebook, you can send an e-mail from plain paper. Send off an update to someone outside the room during a meeting, request someone come down quickly to drop off an urgent document or simply e-mail the minutes of the meeting to all present.

Reporting

• Secret shopper. Most well respected shop chains and fast food chains employee some kind of secret shopper service where an unknown customer`shops’ at a store and does an evaluation based on the customers perspective. I know McDonald’s stores get one every week. So imagine that the secret shopper could complete the form and immediately have the data updated onto the central system so that the scores can be tracked. The store can be updated much faster as well with a copy of the visit on the same day as opposed to several days later in the mail.
• Building and pest inspections. Everyone buying a house does a building and pest inspection. If you were an inspector, instead of filling in the forms on site then going home to retype everything again - why not use a digital pen to complete the form then update automatically into your report template and have it e-mailed to the client - all while you are still standing there with the client.
• OH&S reporting - on site safety audits - fill in the form, update the back office system, have copies available to all parties immediately while you are still on site.
• Audits - pretty much anything you can think off.

Log Books

• Lift maintenance log books. Keep your log book in the lift - get a copy back in the office.
• Fire - any fire based log book - do it on a single page instead of triplicate and get your copy back in the office.
• Aircraft Maintenance - permanent aircraft logs in the aircraft, but electronic copies sent immediately to the aircraft owner and the servicing company.
• Security company incident reports. As part of liquor licensing laws, permanent log books are required to remain on premises, but security companies also want to access and maintain a record - do it with a digital pen - log book stays on site, electronic copies go automatically to the licensee and the security company.
• Virtually anything where a paper copy is required to remain on site and other parties have an interest or right to access that data.

Journalists

• Write your report or article anywhere in the world and lodge it instantly and electronically. No more dictation or transcribing - write it once and get an electronic copy with all your writings converted to text.

That’s enough for now - not quite 101 applications - but you get the general drift of it all. Anything that you can write on paper can be converted instantly into an electronic copy and sent anywhere in the world as a PDF and/or data file. No longer do you need to be content with faxing, dictating or transcribing information that has already been written down. Now with digital pen & paper technology - do it once - do it with Datateq.

Feel free to add your other uses in the comments section.

Anoto Dot Pattern

The Anoto dot pattern is the real brains behind the digital pen & paper technology.

The Digital Paper technology is enabled through a proprietary `Dot Pattern’ which was developed and is owned and licensed by Anoto AB of Sweden. Your Digital paper form is created by printing a proprietary pattern of very small dots on ordinary paper as part of the printing of your forms.

These dots create a grid of XY co-ordinates that the camera in the pen `reads’ and stores. Once the dot co-ordinates are sent to our servers, they are interpreted and displayed as the pen strokes, just like the original document itself.

The dots are so small that for every square 1.8mm on the page there is a total of 36 dots.

The digital pen takes approximately 100 images per second with each image taking in approximately 36 dots at a time to generate it’s precise location on the dot pattern.

If the dots were to be placed on an a grid as in the image above, they are placed in one of four positions, they could be positioned to the right, to the left, above or below the axis.

The Anoto pattern can be printed onto almost any paper, using a standard printing process using a resolution of 1000 dpi, and carbon-based black ink. The paper can be any shape or size greater than 2 mm to a side. The ink absorbs infra red light transmitted from the digital pen. Other colours of ink, including non-carbon-based black, can be used to print information which will be visible to the user, and invisible to the pen.

The image below is a close up of how the dots look at a magnification of 1600%.