I was never a good writer. Not the kind of writing that you read to get information from (that kind of writing I’m not too bad at). I mean the kind of writing where you take a pen and start jotting things down on paper. Suffice to say that when I was in seventh grade “they” sent me to the school psychologist because my handwriting was so bad.

Nowadays, except for signing checks and the like, I do all my writing via the keyboard. For me, it’s not a choice – nobody would be able to read anything I wrote on a pen and paper anyway! And now, after so many years of keyboarding, I’ve practically lost the penmanship skills I ever had anyway!

But for normal people who know what to do with pen and paper, there’s an Israeli invention that lets them digitalize what they’ve written. Pegasus Mobile Note Taker, you can take notes anywhere and on anything, and automatically have it transformed into text, editable in MS Word and the like!  Note Taker doesn’t scan your writing, but actually converts what you write into text. And while there are plenty of digital pads and pens out there that can do the same thing, the chidush here is that you can use regular paper – pads, notebooks, or wherever you take notes.

That sounds cool enough, but if you already have your laptop on the table, why would you want to take notes on a pad using a regular notebook? Seems as if it would be easier to just type directly into the computer! Ah, but Note Taker goes beyond the screen; you can connect the device not just to a computer, but to a cell device too – via Bluetooth! So, if you have a smartphone, you don’t need to shlep a laptop to meetings – just turn your phone and your Note Taker on, start writing, and your text will get recorded as a document in your cell device, for later uploading to your computer!

That in an of itself makes Note Taker extremely useful. But I thought of something even better: Besides a small piece of hardware that you connect to your pad, the system includes OCR software that automatically reads and converts your writing into onscreen text. But it works with graphics as well – so if you’re an artist who draws on paper or even canvas, you can automatically digitize your artwork while you work, with a digital copy of your canvas masterpiece on-screen. Thinking about this aspect of Note Taker’s capability, I got a good business idea for artists – professional or even aspiring:

Paint something good and get the original  of your work into an art gallery or even public institution somewhere, and then sell digital prints of your masterpiece that’s hanging in, for example, city hall! You can appeal to civic pride of town residents, who no doubt would be motivated to buy a reasonably priced copy of a work that graces one of their fine city’s prestigious institutions. Plus, if you’ve donated the original work, you get credit for your public mindedness – always a marketing plus! Set up a website promoting your work and put together an e-mail marketing campaign to reach your customers; as orders come in, you can print out your work one piece at a time, saving money on the up front investment you usually have to make in producing copies of artwork. Find a printer, make a deal on production, and you’re on your way to fame and fortune!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 10th, 2009 at 8:12 am and is filed under cellphones, communication, computers, gadgets, hi-tech, israel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.