Livescribe lures developers to make apps for "pen-computing"

If you haven’t yet heard of the Livescribe Pulse smartpen, it’s a pen that both electronically saves everything you write and draw and records sound, such as a lecture or a business meeting. You can save what you’ve jotted down to your computer. And if you later touch the pen to your written notes, any audio recorded at the time you worte it will be played back for you. Pretty nifty technology, but what else can it do?

Plenty, say Livescribe’s executives who are rapidly building a developer community around the device. Close to 6,500 developers have registered and downloaded a Java-based software development kit to start creating apps. And Wednesday night, Jan. 13, Livescribe is hosting a global developer conference to enlist more developers and to tout the platform.

People can attend the conference at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., or view a Web cast of it at www.livescribe.com. Cash prizes will be awarded March 7 for the best apps developed for the Pulse. The company has invited developers to upload 30-to 90-second videos demonstrating how their apps work.

Livescribe has recently loaded two applications onto the Pulse to whet the appetite of other developers, said Jim Marggraff, founder and chief executive officer. One is a translation app that lets the user to, for example, write the word “please” on a piece of paper, set the pen to translate to Spanish and hear the words “por favor” come from the pen’s speaker and see them spelled out on a display screen. With the other app, the user draws the lines for sheet music on the page and fills in notes for the keys of A, B, C, etc. The pen’s built-in camera recognizes where the notes are on the paper and plays those notes through the speaker.

“People started to play with it and they say, ‘There’s some cool stuff here,’” said Marggraff, who calls the platform pen-based computing. “This is where it’s going now with a set of applications that are only the beginning of a multidimensional [number] of apps that we’re creating.”

Livescribe, based in Oakland, introduced the first Pulse smartpen in 2008 and now offers two models, one with 2 gigabytes of storage for $169 and another with 4 gigabytes for $199. Just like any computer it has inputs and outputs, he said. A camera mounted at the pen point and a microphone are the inputs. The speaker, display screen and a USB connector to a computer are the outputs.

The Livescribe application store, which we wrote about upon its opening in November, currently has about 30 apps available, a mix of free and for sale products. Livescribe gets 35 percent of the sales revenue while the developer gets the rest.

Despite the niche nature of the Livescribe Pulse, it’s attracting a diverse group of developers, said Byron Connell, chief marketing officer. According to a recent survey of Livescribe developers, 70 percent have experience writing Windows PC-based applications and another 30 percent have written smartphone apps, primarily for the Apple iPhone and iPod devices. Some game developers have also joined the Livescribe community. While about 40 percent of them plan to develop consumer apps, another 18 percent are targeting the education market and 14 percent the enterprise market.

The Pulse works with specially printed paper, called “dot paper,” with navigational icons preprinted on it, such as the “pause,” “play” and “stop” functions for the audio recorder. The device recognizes the keys on a preprinted image of a calculator and performs the calculations. One of the present applications allows a user to print their own dot paper on their own printer.

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