If you haven’t used Livescribe before, let me explain. Imagine a cross between a Moleskine notebook, a digital voice recorder, and Tivo. Based on a specialized pen and paper, it allows you to automatically transfer any notes you take onto your computer, where you can search through them or share them as PDF’s. In addition, the pen can record sound as you are writing, which gives a much more human element to your notes. Best of all, these notes can be shared remotely with other people through the power of the web. You really have to see it to believe it.

Let me go on a bit about why I value Livescribe so much …

Flexibility

Livescribe has the basic flexibility of pen and paper, and that can’t be overrated. Back in the day I was that person who brought his laptop to meetings to type up notes and send them out to everyone. It seemed cool, and nice, and it was good to be able to refer to things later. The problem was, it was deceptively ineffective. I was confusing motion for action. If someone is presenting, I may need to take notes. If they are drawing, I may need to do a quick sketch. If they are talking (especially emotionally) I need to understand.

This just can’t be done typing into any text based tools, and I have tried a lot of them (I used the heck out of VoodooPad and heartily recommend it, but not more than paper). I can’t stop in the middle of a meeting to open a drawing program to try and copy what is on the whiteboard. Even if I could, I couldn’t go back and examine the flow of the meeting, determine what the key points were and what I might have missed or could have done better.

Accessibility

Livescribe has the accessibility of both paper and computer. I use a Moleskine-sized notebook as my “daybook”, to record who I met, what I did, and things I need to do in the future. I also take notes on meetings and do a lot of brainstorming before I start coding. This allows me to really focus on the important things (people, concepts, ideas) and not get wrapped up in time-wasters. This isn’t something unique to Livescribe, I got the same thing with the moleskine or a plain pad of paper.

The dramatic advantage that Livescribe has over paper is that I can go back and search my notes for previous entries or words or phrases that might pertain to whatever I am thinking about today. I do that a lot less with Livescribe than I thought I would, simply because I seem to remember things better if I write them down. However, the times that I have had to do a search it has been absolutely invaluable.

Recording and Sharing

The most impressive feature of the system is the ability to share your notes with others. While some people would use this for class notes and the like, I am long out of college and working in the world. As a Sales Engineer I have to travel a lot and visit clients and prospects in pretty remote locations. I don’t always have my Account Executive with me, but he definitely needs to know what is going on whenever possible.

This is where Livescribe really proves its worth. The ability to share a recording of a meeting (along with detailed notes) is awesome. When I get on a plane I can review a meeting myself, and later send it to my partner who can know just about everything that went on in the room, with enough detail to understand what was verbalized and how.

In Conclusion

Livescribe really gives you the best of both worlds, paper and electronic. It fully lives in both media, but combines the two in a way that is greater than the sum of the parts. Sure, I have some grumbles (the pen is large, I wish there were more paper options, the pen doesn’t have a top and there isn’t a good, small pen case available, it is harder than it should be to search across multiple notebooks, you can’t group pages or use metadata with the electronic text) but overall it is invaluable to me.

You will have to pull Livescribe from my cold, dead fingers!

Whenever I used a system, there was always some cognitive dissonance between paper space and electronic space. I think this is because of the fundamental differences in the media. Paper is very simple and easy to use. It is well-established, well-supported and handles both structured and unstructured information very well. Electronic data is just the opposite; it is new, evolving, and limited in what it can represent. It can be difficult to use if you aren’t doing exactly what is expected. However, information stored in electronic media are much easier to search, sort, share, store, and duplicate. This is a great advantage for a lot of things, but not everything.

My desire is wanting the ease of use and flexibility of paper, but the power to search and share like electronic media. I think I may have found this in the Livescribe Pulse. The Pulse is a pen and paper combination that allows you to use paper like you want to, but then have the information synchronized with your computer. The text is searchable (through a proprietary application) and can be exported to the web.

In addition, the Pulse is able to record sound as you write, which can be invaluable during meetings where your hand can’t keep up with the banter. You can then touch the page and play back your recording directly from your notes, to see what people were talking about when you wrote your cryptic note. This makes the export capability all the more interesting, as it essentially makes a movie, with the picture being your pages and the audio being the sounds around you as you took your notes. The entire movie is exportable as well (see some examples here).

While it is in its infancy, this is very, very, very interesting technology. There are several things that I wish it had:

• The ability to group like pages from different notebooks to organize my own folders of information (something like a tag cloud).
• The ability to export movies privately as Flash or QuickTime, to only share them with the people who I want to, not the whole web.

Also, while the paper choices are decent, they are proprietary and certainly don’t compare with some of the better paper systems out there (like Moleskine or Levenger). I would like to be able to get normal 8 1/2 x 11″ paper and put them into a Circa notebook easily. Also, there isn’t any graph paper which is a problem for a math geek like myself.

It is new, and I would give it the benefit of the doubt. If you are in the market for a new planner, I would give it a look. It really starts to blur the lines between different media in a way that really benefits the user instead of the purveyor. More on this next time.