By Nino Simic*

Imagine writing and drawing with an ordinary ballpoint pen on a pad but being able to mail anything you do to anyone you like, and having it reach the computer already in Word format, simply by pressing a button.

You have the flexibility of pen and paper to work wherever you like coupled with the opportunities the digital world offers to add pictures, change typeface, send your notes as e-mail or remove and add things afterwards. Anoto’s pen offers these and many more opportunities.

It started as a playful attempt at creating a mouse-mat where each point would correspond to a place on the screen, socalled absolute positioning. Before the game was over, the computer wizards had hit upon a method for combining pen and computer.

Patterns of dots

”They came up with a cunning mathematical way of putting dots on a surface,” explains Örjan Johansson, managing director of Anoto. He also happens to be the one who saw to Ericsson’s Bluetooth technology becoming the world standard.

With its built-in camera, the pen ”sees” six dots at a time. The number of possible six-dot combinations would cover a sheet of paper as big as the whole of Asia and Europe – 600 millions sheets of A4!

All that is needed for the pen to work as intended is for the paper being written on to be printed with Anoto’s pattern of dots. Örjan Johansson demonstrates how it works: he draws and writes, presses lightly in a square on the special notepad and – hey presto! – his sketch is mailed via a mobile phone to the recipient of his choice. By pressing again in different squares on the pad, the pen understands that the drawing, when sent to a recipient, must be displayed in a different colour or drawn with thicker lines.

There are a countless number of applications, all of which save valuable time and arduous work. Perhaps the most interesting applications are concerned with form-handling and logistics.

FedEx is one of the corporate giants wanting to use the Anoto pen. Their standard paper-based processing works out at 4-5 euro per package. Each consignment is accompanied by several paper copies, which have to be sent to and archived in various places. The idea instead is to fill in a single original of the form, which is printed with Anoto’s pattern of dots. When the package is duly delivered and the form completed, the courier can mail the information to everyone concerned with a simple press of a button. The recipients receive the correctly completed form as an image. With FedEx delivering 3,000,000 packages per day worldwide, the savings are enormous!

Japanese car buyers

In Japan we have found another application: to buy a car in Tokyo, you have to prove that you have a parking place. The car-buyer must complete a form and provide a sketch of the parking place. Normally, the paper is filed in gigantic archives. The new forms, which are printed with Anoto’s pattern, are emailed instead and appear on the authority’s computers as images of correctly completed pages.

The list of potential fields of application is a long one: clinical trials can be carried out more quickly if participants are able report their symptoms directly online. E-learning can also benefit from Anoto: books can be printed on an underlying pattern of dots and readers wanting to learn more about a subject can use the pen to press the appropriate part of the book in order to receive additional information on their computer.

”The paperless society is a myth,” says Örjan Johansson. ”Paper is good, and the digital pen brings together the best features of paper and IT.”

The Anoto technology recently took another step forward when Logitech launched a pen that can transfer the stored information to a computer via an adapter.

Örjan Johansson now expects Anoto’s system, which was introduced in the spring, to increase in volume. There is no competition and, with 500 million PC users and 1.2 billion mobile-phone users worldwide, the future is undeniably bright.

This article was originally published by Øresund IT Magasine (Autumn 2002). In Publications, you can download the magazine in PDF format.

*Nino Simic is a Swedish journalist living in Lund.