Digital Pen and Paper, A New Thin Client Part Two
Unlike the “Mariner” in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” we have stopped everyone, not limiting ourselves to wedding guest's, and asked them to try this process. In Taylor's epic poem the wedding guest is bemused by the “Mariner” and also annoyed by the man's tale. But the guest's interest turns fascination as he realizes that the mariner is describing supernatural events.
Two of the more famous passages:
Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.
Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.
Digital Pen Voting by PenVote.com is not a supernatural event, but for many it appears to be just that. We have been successful on occasions to explain the process and it is wonderful to watch someone as they experience the “Ah Ha! I get it!” There will be more.
A couple of weeks ago Jeff Bell with Business First of Columbus called and asked about the project. Jeff wrote about digital pen voting by PenVote last summer. Late in the first interview I saw Jeff's eye's roll back and he asked a impromptu strong question and Chris answered. He experienced the “Ah Ha.” Below is a follow up report published last Friday by Jeff Bell.
Have also included the report By JANE MCCARTHY with Seattle's KING 5 News further below. She interviews Ken Schneider, CEO of Adapx. He is only the second person that I have read about that recognized that Anoto enabled paper with a digital pen is a thin client/computer. "So what that means is the paper, in effect, becomes the computer and the pen is like a mobile device and it's blue-tooth enabled," said Schneider. Adapx is expanding the depth and breadth of digital paper uses to into new markets. We wish them well.
My take is similar to Schneider's in that the paper is the monitor and the pen is a keyboard. It is the combination of the appearance of low tech with the really easy use of high tech that makes this solution elegant, or is it supernatural?
Friday, April 25, 2008
Election tech startups find common ground
Business First of Columbus by Jeff Bell Business First
Two startup companies in Columbus are working together to see if they can make digital pen-and-paper technology a common tool in Ohio petition drives and elections.
Ohio Petition Co. will invest $50,000 in digital pen hardware, software and other equipment while drawing on PenVote's expertise to deploy the technology on voter-registration forms and petitions in voter signature campaigns, said Ian James, an Ohio Petition principal.
That investment will help PenVote get the certification it needs from Anoto Group AB, a Swedish company that controls the technology for the digital pen-and-paper system, said PenVote co-founder Chris Wilson.
"For us, the funding issue has been the biggest challenge," said Wilson, a former Franklin County elections official who launched PenVote last year with business associate Steve Hilsman.
The first big test of the technology could come as early as May, James said, when the Ohioans for Healthy Families Coalition could begin collecting signatures to place a paid-sick-leave proposal on the statewide ballot in November.
James said he is optimistic his company will land a contract to help collect the 120,683 valid signatures needed to put the issue on the ballot. He worked last year with sick-leave mandate proponents on their statewide drive.
PenVote has helped develop a digital pen-and-paper voter registration form that would be used in the sick-leave signature drive and other petition projects to be taken on by Ohio Petition Co. It fits well with a process the company has developed to provide a line-by-line review of all signatures within 72 hours.
Winning over officials
In a nutshell, digital paper contains thousands of tiny dots that are read by a digital pen. The pen writes in ink and contains a small sensor that records the locations of the pen strokes on the paper. The pen is placed into a cradle, and the data on it is downloaded to a computer for review.
James and Wilson connected shortly after James, Julie Heffelfinger, Chris Kvinta and Stephen Letourneau launched Ohio Petition Co. in January.
Digital pen technology also has potential beyond the elections field, James said. For example, it could it be used to record responses to consumer surveys or register participants at large events. That's fine with Wilson, but he said his focus will remain on election applications.
Like other states, Ohio is moving back to paper ballots because of studies that challenge the security of electronic voting systems. Wilson said PenVote's digital pen-and-paper technology would provide a reliable, cost-effective way to record votes on paper ballots, but he has yet to win over the Ohio Secretary of State's office, which oversees elections in the state.
"We know it will be a long-term battle," Wilson said. "There are pockets of interest around, but the dam hasn't opened for us yet."
Until it does, PenVote will concentrate on the development of voter registration and petition forms as well as a digital pen-and-paper poll book it tested last November in Franklin County. In a field trial at a precinct in New Albany during the November general election, PenVote took existing paper poll books - the ones signed by voters upon arriving at their polling place - and printed them on dot-enabling digital paper. Voters signed the books with a digital pen, which was docked at the end of the voting day. At that point, the digital pen equipment instantly applied the poll-book information to Franklin County's voter registration database.
Wilson said the digital pen technology eliminated the time-consuming and error-prone manual process in which electronic wands read and scan in the data. In a letter to Wilson after the election, Franklin County Board of Elections Director Matt Damschroder said the field test was "exceptionally successful."
614-220-5456 | jabell@bizjournals.com
And Jane McCarthy with Seattle's KING 5 News
08:53 AM PDT on Tuesday, April 29, 2008
By JANE MCCARTHY / KING 5 News
SEATTLE - Over the years, there has been a lot of talk about computers taking the place of good old-fashioned pen and paper. Now a Seattle company is merging the two.
The company is called Adapx (pronounced "adapts"); a prominent technology research company recently named them among the 2008 cool vendors in emerging technology.
From firefighters positioning crews to battle back flames in Southern California to the troops gathering intelligence in Iraq, many are still charting their next moves on a map.
Now, many of them are doing that with a new digital pen from Adapx.
"A digital pen is a much simpler thing for a soldier to carry on the ground than a laptop," said Ken Schneider, CEO of Adapx.
Their capturx software along with a digital pen allows people to print a document off of any normal printer and digitally enable that paper.
"So what that means is the paper, in effect, becomes the computer and the pen is like a mobile device and it's blue-tooth enabled," said Schneider.
As you write, all the information is collected in the digital pen. When you dock the pen in a computer, all the information appears on a screen. Map data that has historically taken days, even months, to update is now done in seconds. The system can also download handwriting and even doodling.
If you ask the people at Adapx, all this talk about pen and paper falling out of favor is a fallacy.
"In many respects, we don't think society has gotten away from the pen at all," said Schneider.
The mapping technology has only been available for a few months and the company now has clients worldwide.
Until the next post,
Steve
