www.dpingram.com

For the first time since I bought a laptop 20 years ago, I have a gadget that is transforming the way I work.

It is my “magic pen”, as I like to describe it, or the Pulse from Livescribe, to give its correct title.

Until now, I have relied on an ordinary reporter’s notebook and pen to take notes in interviews.

I have 100-words-a-minute Teeline shorthand, learned 30 years ago at journalist training college, but my handwriting is terrible and reading and translating pages and pages of squiggles can be daunting.

Over the years, I’ve used several brands of voice recorders to help out, trying to remember to write down, alongside the shorthand, the time shown on the counter when asking a question.

About five years ago, I tried a tablet PC with Microsoft’s OneNote software, which allowed you to tap and create audio bookmarks next to your notes made onscreen with a stylus. However, the software proved buggy and I was never comfortable with the laptop.

The Pulse is a thickish but fairly light and easy-to-handle pen. It has an LED display for time and other information, a speaker and built-in microphones.

It comes with a notebook printed with barely discernible dots on its blank pages and with special controls along the bottom of the page.

Tapping on a “Record” button on the bottom starts audio recording and, as I begin to scrawl, an infra-red camera in the pen tip also records to the two-gigabyte internal memory chip the movements of my writing.

The tiny dots on the page are aligned in such a way as to act like a positioning system on a map and, as the infra-red scans them, it charts the voyage of my shorthand across the page and the internal processor syncs it in time with the audio. Press a “Stop” symbol and recording ends.

Then comes the magic part. Going back over my notes, I can tap on any word and instantly hear through the pen’s speaker the part of the conversation when I wrote it. I can jump around, pause, go back and change the playback speed by tapping around my squiggles or on the controls at the bottom of the page.

Earphones with built-in microphones that plug into the top of the pen give better playback sound, and extra microphones built into them also improve the recording when I’m taking notes on a keynote speech in a hall. I also wear them underneath a headset to record phone interviews clearly.

The Pulse has many other features and possibilities too numerous to mention here. It is primarily aimed at college students taking notes in lecture halls, but journalists, lawyers and anyone who takes minutes of meetings would find it useful.

A 1Gb version costs $150 and a 2Gb one $200, while the notebooks and pen refills cost about the same as regular office supplies.

Livescribe also allows users to upload note pages and accompanying audio to a PC desktop application, as well as providing a website account, where notes can be shared with others.

Now, I’m learning to reduce my shorthand squiggles and spell out key words, questions and phrases instead, in order to provide quick links to the relevant audio quotes and allow others to collaborate on stories.

For me, this is the culmination of a technology I first read about in a Wired magazine article seven years ago. It told the story of a Swedish start-up Anoto, founded in 1999.

The small team developed the dot-displacement technology that could create unique patterns of locations, varied enough for paper to be produced that could cover the entire planet and beyond and have each square millimetre represent a specific mappable area.

In 2001, Ericsson brought out a “Chatpen” using Anoto’s technology. It had a Bluetooth chip inside so the pen could communicate with a cell phone and written messages could be e-mailed or faxed with the tick of a box on the paper.

Anoto had a “three-year plan for world domination” said the article. There were three fundamental technologies for gathering, storing and spreading information – voice, computer, and paper and pen, said the company’s founder. “Now we make this one digital and wireless like the others.”

Sadly though, digital pens have never really taken off. The Chatpen was a fat pen that Ericsson discontinued, as were similar devices developed by Nokia, Logitech and Hewlett-Packard.

Such pens have gained some traction in the enterprise, where remote workers use them for filling in forms and submitting them over the internet.

However, Livescribe’s twist on the Anoto concept is synchronising handwriting with a voice recording rather than with remote servers.

The Bay Area company’s founder developed more rudimentary but successful tap-and-hear devices with Leapfrog, the educational toymaker.

With luck, his American marketing skills combined with the licensing of Anoto’s European innovation could make Livescribe the company that writes a new chapter for digital pens.