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IT’S goodbye to the idea of the paperless office: a new electronic pen could
bring paper back with a bang. Instead of tapping away on a computer keyboard,
the new pen lets you scribble e-mails freehand on special paper and then send it
across the Internet via your mobile phone.

The pen, made by Anoto of Lund, Sweden, has a standard ballpoint nib and the
maker is touting it as the only thing you’ll need to talk to your computer,
apart from the paper supplied in the form of a personal organiser.

As you write an appointment in your organiser, your words are recognised by a
camera in the pen and instantly transmitted to a PC where they appear in a
Microsoft Outlook organiser package. Similarly, you can draw pictures or write
messages in your own scrawl—or have it converted to text—before
choosing to e-mail it, fax it or send it as a text message via your mobile
phone.

The pen will open up an entirely new market in e-commerce by letting you buy
items advertised in a magazine just by scribbling your credit card details on
the page and ticking the “buy” box. The plan is to have special advertisements
on the magazine page printed with the dot pattern to allow the pen to do
this.

The paper has millions of imperceptible dots printed on it in an asymmetrical
pattern (see Diagram).
The pen scans the dots to figure out precisely where it
is on the page. It can do this to an accuracy of 30 microns, says Christer
Fåhraeus, founder and chief executive of Anoto. In fact, he says, the pattern of
dots also contains coordinate information about what page it is on and where the
page comes from, distinguishing between an ad or a page in a calendar, say.

This means you can treat a normal-looking piece of paper as if it were a
windows-like screen on a computer, where you can point and click on printed
buttons—although it’s more a case of point and tick. Anoto joined forces
with personal organiser company Time Manager to produce pages incorporating such
features.

The pen scans the page with its infrared camera that ignores the ink and
follows the pen’s movement instead. The pen can store an entire notepad’s worth
of information in its memory. A transmitter/receiver sends this information to a
nearby mobile phone, PC or palmtop via a 2.4 gigahertz microwave signal
conforming to the new Bluetooth standard, which lets devices communicate up to a
range of 10 metres.

By 2004, there will be around 600 million mobile Internet subscribers,
predicts Jan Ahrenbring of Ericsson, which part owns Anoto. When the pen is
launched early next year—at around $100—they expect the Anoto
to attract these surfers because it is so easy to use. You take the lid off to
turn it on, and then start writing. And despite the influx of voice recognition
technology, Ahrenbring believes that people won’t easily give up the pen.
“Handwriting is very much part of your personality,” he says.