Ever since Post-it notes became popular in the 1980’s by 3M, no one has really managed to modernize them. I guess that saying “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” applies here. There’s never been any reason to try and come up with something better because Post-it notes just work! While it works, MIT must have thought there were ways to improve it and make it a little more modern because they’ve reinvented the Post-it note with something else called “Quickies.” As you can imagine, coming from MIT it’s all about the electronics involved.
TFOT Gives a good explanation of what Quickie is all about, and they also had some great pictures as well:
A newly-written Quickie is a simple Post-it note, which is scribed on a sensitive pad that allows the computer to capture and store the written information. This is done using commercially available digital-pen hardware, which translates the movement of the pen on the surface of the paper sticky note into digital information. The data can be viewed at any time through the Quickie software, which stores the sticky notes as images and converts the hand-written notes into computer-understandable text using available handwriting recognition algorithms.
Take a look at the video below and you’ll get a great idea of what the Quickies are all about:
After watching the video, I have to admit that it is impressive how text messaging and adding appointments to a calendar are so simple to use. And of course each note has got RFID embedded into so that they’ll be easy to locate, but is that what people are looking to do with their post-it notes? I noticed in the comments of the video that someone said, “one word, over-engineered” They pointed out how it’s simply not practical. While it’s definitely a cool concept, I think post-it notes are popular because they’re simple and they aren’t digitized.
Do you see this as something that could actually be useful? Or is this not what you’re looking for a post-it note to do?
This seems very cool. Only today I was sitting at the PC thinking about how I was going to have to find some way to type up all the various notes I’ve made, lists, funny things etc. Using technology like this would be great – an instant paper copy for physical use around the place, but a permanent record of it on the computer for searching with meta data such as who wrote it and the time it was written. It would be cool if the detector was the pen – then anything you wrote anywhere around your PC could be logged.
Incidentally, do you know of any small scanners that behave like a fax machine rather than a flat bed – I’m looking for something that I can just feed paper into and have it produce PDF files, as opposed to having to put things one by one on a flatbed and scan them?
Cool idea and vid, but I don’t know how practical that kinda thing is.
This can’t preplicate the physical use of a post-it note. They’re great bookmarks. The only new thing here, really, is the RFID tag per piece of paper. There have been pen/receiver devices for writing on any paper and exporting to PDA/computer w/ or w/o OCR for years. They’re not convenient because there’s no way to accomodate reuse and the resolution is small and only 1 bit. IMNSHO, replacing paper is almost impossible. Paper can be a physical container, a structural device, can be folded, etc. These things aren’t even good enhanced RFID tags. The glue on a post-it note is for temporary or light adhesion without marking.
That’s funny you ask that because just the other day Ryan and I were talking about this because I had several documents I wanted to scan. I know such scanners exist, but the really nice ones are normally for businesses and typically fairly expensive.
One inexpensive option is [accessories.us.dell.com] from Epson. It says you can load up to 30 sheets.
It is very cool, but I agree that it’s not very practical and probably wouldn’t be something that the general public would embrace as they’ve done with regular post-it notes.
Inferno_str1ke & Ashley,
I bought a canon pixma all in one printer scanner just for that purpose. After having it used to digitize a lot of filling documents I do recommend it to anyone. There is also an expensive machine that just do that: you feed it paper and it automatically converts them to pdf. with the canon printer I have you use a supplied software to convert images to pdfs which isn’t too bad. you can feed about 30-35 papers at a time. One crucial component of this is using a program that tag your files/documents so that when you have too many of them then you can easily search and retrieve them. for that I use a program called tag2find which is completely free and does an excellent job in tagging various files del.i.cious style. I also use axCrypt free program to encrypt files that have sensitive information. I wrote about this in cybernet forum as well. check it out.
As far as the quickies product is concerned, the idea is definitely cool and I can see many people using it as well but this really borders on overdoing it. For some people who have the need to organize everything this might work. but for others if you end up spending more time or resources on organizing stuff than the time it is going to save then it’s an overkill.
Thanks for the tip Wolfe! I like the idea of a program to tag the documents that you scan. Otherwise it could become pretty tedious trying to find what you’re looking for.