The Digital Scribe | Westborough plays host to Anoto, the makers of a high-tech pen
This Industrial Strength column is a bit unlike most others. As I’ve been told by the editor of this publication, it’s not really “industrial,” as the company featured here does not manufacture anything in Central Massachusetts.
But what they do make struck me as so fascinating that I can put aside the fact that it’s actually made in the company’s homeland of Sweden. What the company makes and markets is a digital pen.
Anoto has a sales office in Westborough, and that’s where the president and CEO of Anoto America works. What he showed me during a recent visit is certainly worth an exception.
Electronic Scribbles
One of my first questions for Pietro Parravicini, president and CEO, was about who uses or could use the Anoto pen.
Think about the guy who comes to your workplace and replaces your windshield in the parking lot. You have to sign for that, right? He has to file that form somewhere at some point, right? With a digital pen, you can sign for the work, he can upload the form directly to his office, cutting down on the time spent on administrative stuff and allowing him to fix more windshields.
And the application reaches across many other sectors. Think of all the places you have to fill out a form and sign your name.
“We’re connecting pen and paper and analog handwriting into the digital world,” Parravicini explained. In essence, data capture and data entry are reduced to one simple step.
I tried the pen at Anoto’s office. I filled out a generic form and watched as the information I provided was instantaneously loaded, in PDF form, to a computer. The form on the computer actually looked clearer than the handwritten form, and it was ready to be e-mailed, cataloged, whatever.
But it wasn’t always easy for Anoto.
“We envisioned riding the telecom wave in 2000 and 2001, and we all know where that went,” Parravicini said.
Luckily, the company began attracting attention from companies, mostly small, interested in using digital pen technology and in 2004 and 2005, Anoto decided to concentrate its focus on the business-to-business market.
Now, anyone from doctors to plumbers is using the Anoto pen. The Brockton police department is using Anoto technology to write traffic tickets.
And it can be accomplished without any special training on the part of the people using the technology. To them, it’s just like using a pen.
But it’s not really a pen. In fact, the ink is just for show. The pen has an ink cartridge, but it also has a tiny infrared camera, a bit of memory, a battery and is wired for Bluetooth.
The paper used with Anoto’s pen has a slight gray coloration. The gray is the result of innumerable microdots on the paper. The dots are on a grid delineated with an X and Y axis, and they are what the camera captures.
The camera takes 60 pictures per second of the microdots as one “writes” and the coordinates of those dots are transmitted into a computer system.
Those coordinates are then linked together to recreate what the user has written digitally. One of Anoto’s partners has even developed handwriting recognition software that can turn scribbles into code.
The applications for this technology are wide ranging. Leap Frog uses it in products for preschoolers. Polyvision, a large manufacturer of white boards is developing “smart boards” that use Anoto technology.
The whole thing seemed far out to me. Then I realized that the technology could load the messy notes from my reporter’s notebook to my work computer instantly, from anywhere, and make it easier to read. I’m sold.
Got new for our Industrial Strength column? E-mail WBJ Managing Editor Matthew L. Brown at mbrown@wbjournal.com.
Watch as Anoto's president and CEO, Pietro Parravincini, demonstrates his company's digital pen technology:
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