Originally published August 22 2005
New digital note-taking system allows users to access their data on the internet
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
The PaperPC system, developed by a small company in a Parisian suburb, combines technologies with a digital pen from Nokia, digital "paper" made by Clairefontaine, Bluetooth to send information to a laptop or cell phone and software that compresses files so that they can be sent using a cell phone.
Three French companies, with an assist from the Finns and the Swedes, have combined their ingenuity to come up with a digital pen-and-paper system called PaperPC that, broadly speaking, digitizes anything you can write with a pen.
What makes it different from similar systems is that it also collects all of your notes, drawings or handwritings so that they are available to you - or the friends or colleagues you designate - from anywhere that you can access the Internet.
The PaperPC system comes out of a nine-employee company called MetaLinks Communications, based in Rueil-Malmaison, a suburb of Paris, but it is being marketed by Clairefontaine, the French paper company.
Barth�lemy Gilles, the chief executive and one of four partners in MetaLinks, was working for a Clairefontaine rival five years ago on bar-code systems and other high-tech uses for paper and ink, "trying to bridge the gap between analog and digital," he said.
Nokia licenses the Anoto technology and makes the pens.
Gilles and his team have devised software that compresses the digital notes enough so that they can be transmitted from the phone, just as a text message or e-mail is sent, to a central computer server maintained by MetaLinks, where - in under a minute, in my experience - they become accessible via any standard browser on the Internet.
Optical character recognition technology from a third French company, Vision Objects, converts your handwriting into type, in several languages, including Japanese and simplified Chinese.
So now you have your notes on paper, on your mobile phone, on your PC and on the Internet, where they can be shared, in both their original form and converted into block text.
Regular data fees from your mobile carrier apply for the files you transmit to or from your cellphone, but MetaLinks compression keeps the files small.
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