Livescribe, whose Pulse smartpen takes audio recordings linked to your handwritten notes, is making it possible to share those notes and recordings in what it calls a "pencast" -- and then to embed those pencasts on any blog or website.
Users have been uploading Livescribe pencasts to the Oakland, Calif. startup's online community since last year, but now Livescribe is bringing pencasts to the rest of the web as embeddable Flash videos. I've embedded a pencast explaining the concept below, but it's exactly what you'd expect -- it shows the presenter's notes as they write them, coupled with audio.
Obviously, this won't have all the multimedia bells and whistles of a video created with presentation software like PowerPoint or Flypaper, but this could be pretty useful for folks who explain themselves with handwritten notes and diagrams. Given Livescribe's strong fit with the college audience, it's not surprising that many of the samples mentioned in Livescribe's announcement are academic lectures. Or if you're drawing your business plan on the back of a napkin, you can use a pencast to share that plan with a broader audience.
The company says pencasts have already been viewed 1.5 million times on its website, giving a nice social dimension to the product. And of course, if pencasts start showing up on a bunch of websites, that's nice marketing for the company too.
Livescribe has raised a total of $48.8 million in venture backing. You can also check out this video of the demonstration Livescribe gave at the DEMO conference last year.
Pencast of a Pencastbrought to you by Livescribehttp://www.livescribe.com/media/swf/embedPlayer.swf