Livescribe, creators of the Pulse smartpen, have announced a tool that turns your handwritten notes and audio recordings into Flash videos, called “pencasts,” that you can embed within any Web site or blog.
Publishing multimedia from your smartpen is a bizarre application of some bizarre technology, but it’s also some geeky ubiquitous computing fun!
Here’s an example pencast:
The Pulse smartpen is sort of a pen on steroids. The base version is $150, has 1GB of memory and can record 100 hours of audio. It comes with a recording headset, a USB dock and software to let you sync your audio and pencasts with your computer.
Pencasts are interactive Flash videos of handwritten notes and audio captured by the Pulse smartpen. To embed a pencast, individuals simply find a pencast on their My Livescribe page or the Livescribe Community, click “Embed this file” and then copy and paste the HTML into a Web site or blog.
Livescribe provides each Pulse smartpen user 250MB of free online storage to share pencasts either publicly or privately. In addition to embedding pencasts on Web sites or posting them on the Livescribe Community, individuals can share pencasts directly on Facebook (click here to see example), save their notes as a PDF file or export their recordings into an audio file.
Is there a future for smartpens and pencasting? Leave a comment with your thoughts!
