This is the first of a series of posts we plan related to the industrial design of the Exbiblio scanning device. Coming soon, we plan to have interviews with the design team, design sketches, and photos of the prototypes.

I’ll start by showing some charts the design team put together to study existing gadgets on the market for comparison, discussion, and inspiration. The following images show a variety of the USB drives currently on the market. Note that our scanning device is likely to have USB drive functionality in addition to the text scanning and voice recording features.

I’ve been a little quiet on the blog while I’ve been here at the Exbiblio office. I can report that I’m collecting lots of material to write up later. I’ve also been helping Ariel with a big rewrite of the copy on the Exbiblio website. I’m looking for examples of uses for Exbiblio’s first product, the oPen, which is due out next Spring.

Let me recap. Despite its name, the oPen is not really a pen at all. We hope to give you some pictures soon. It’s a sleek and flat little rectangle that will easily slip into a shirt pocket. It’s a text scanner with big aspirations. Let me numerate a few. I would be glad for more examples.

• If it lives up to its promise, the oPen will be the most compact and reliable text scanner to date. So if you are reading a book, it will be no trouble to highlight a paragraph and save it. There’s no need to deface your book with a note or underline, or turn the corner of the page, or stick a post-it note inside. You’ve captured the text and can keep it on your computer. This is its most simple function. It’s a little underrated in the great Exibiblio “vision” but for my money, this is its most easy-to-understand and useful function.
• If you want to add a few thoughts about what you just read, you can mutter them into the oPen. It save the sound file linked to the quotation you have chosen.
• If the book you are reading is out of copyright, there’s a good chance that a digital copy of it exists on the web somewhere. Once your quotation is saved on your computer, the Exbiblio system will find the context for you. You will be able to expand your quotation to look at the whole page, chapter, or book. If you know that a digital copy exists, all you have to do is scan a few words because the Exbiblio system will find the rest for you.
• Once you have a collection of quotations on your computer, you can search them, tag them, and sift them – do all the things that you like to do on computers.
• You can, of course, share your quotations by emailing them and blogging them.
• The Exbiblio system will be great for cross-referencing. Suppose you are reading a biography of a British Prime Minister that quotes a few lines of a famous speech, “We shall fight them on the beaches.” The Exbiblio system will find the rest of that speech for you. Similarly, citations of other reference books and sources can lead you to the original text. There’s no need for a researcher keep going back to the library to look up every cross-reference.
• It will also work as a bar code scanner – so you can can catalogue your book or cd collection, or if you work in business you can use it to keep track of inventory.
• If you are reading a poster or a notice on a wall, the Exbiblio pen could lead you to more information on the web about an event – see MyTago and Smartpox

These are just a few possible uses. I’m starting to think that I would be happy to fork out a few quid (I’m English) for one of these. Let your imagination take free reign. I’d be glad to have any more examples.

I left a beautiful sunny autumn’s day on London yesterday and flew out to Seattle for my third trip to Exbiblio. I didn’t bring a coat or an umbrella – an omission considering the rainy weather here this morning.

It’s easy for me to stroll into work early as I’m still on London time and am staying just around the corner near Pioneer Square. I’m able to chat with the office early birds, Spencer and Claes Fredrik. I’ve not met Spencer before, but he helps me find a room in the new “wing” of the expanding office. I’m strategically positioned just near the table with the enticing snacks – fresh berries and tangy sheep’s cheese. Claes Fredrik helps me get my aging laptop plugged into the network. We chat a little bit about some of the technologies that have been showing up on the blog.

While blogging away in London, I’ve been trying to fill in the picture of the universe in which Exbiblio is operating. There seem to be a number of companies working on bridging the divide between paper and digital. They are rather disparate, and I don’t think you can quite call it a movement yet – but there’s a lot going on in this space. This week I’m planning to write more about what Exbiblio’s up to.

On this trip I’m hoping to see the first prototype of the Exbiblio Scanner Pen, code-named Falstaff. I believe there have been some glitches causing delays – which is only to be expected on a project of this nature, but it can be hard to get engineers to talk about glitches.

As Spencer has just been saying to me a minute ago, Exbiblio is a stimulating place to work, both intellectually and on the “values” level of not being overtly hyper profit-driven. It’s striking how recruits say they were attracted by Exbiblio’s values page on its website. However, I am hoping to tease a business / marketing plan out of the more “senior” people in its “flat” management structure. It’s time to write about matters such as useful applications for Exbiblio’s technology, target markets, return on investment – the sort of stuff that business people normally talk about. I haven’t heard a great deal of that ilk on my previous trips. Perhaps I haven’t asked the right questions, but I also get a sense that these matters are not always to the fore, perhaps because the technical challenges are so absorbing for Exbiblio intellects. I’m also going to ask about Exbiblio’s laudable aims to change the world for the better (which I think people will be very glad to talk about) but Exbiblio’s good intentions depend on being a business success first.

One of the underrated uses of running a corporate blog, is that it’s a wonderful market research tool. Comments and in-coming links point out trends and similar products, and help fill out the universe of the world in which you are operating. You learn how other people treading down the same path as you are fairing, and you receive feedback on your own ideas. You might even meet up with some fellow travellers on the way.

Since starting to write for this blog, I’ve been amazed about how many people are trying to make web pages more like paper. A smaller group is trying to make paper more like web pages – and I think we can all agree that the latter is the bigger challenge.

Our thanks are due once again to Francisco Soto, a frequent visitor to this blog, who first pointed out Hyperwords. Now, in the comments to that post, he’s drawn our attention to Diigo, a social bookmarking and annotation tool.

Diigo is a tool to make web pages more paper-like. It does this by means of “sticky notes” on which you can jot down your thoughts about a particular paragraph of text on the web. The notes overlay the web page. You can also share those thoughts with other users, if you wish. Like Hyperwords, it comes as an extension to your web browser.

The tool seems to work very efficiently to me. First you highlight some text, and Diigo underlines it. You write your note in a pop-up form. When you return to the web page, your text will still be underlined and you can see your note by hovering your mouse over the top. Elsewhere, you can go to a social bookmark page somewhat like del.icio.us and read what others have been saying about the text. You can do other things too, like blog or email the paragraph.

Diigo seem to be very concerned about clutter. People tend to write up lots of vacuous thoughts about stuff, like “interesting”. It doesn’t really enlighten anyone much. Of course the vast majority of web pages don’t have anything written about them at all – that’s another problem.

This idea has a history. In 1999, Third Voice launched a browser plug-in that allowed users to add sticky notes to web pages. Surprisingly, many web publishers and hosts hated it because they said it made their pages look like they were covered in graffiti. Some 400 of them launched a campaign called “Say No to TV”.

The timing was unfortunate. Third Voice closed its doors in the downturn of 2001 when it couldn’t get financing. Wired News gave its verdict:

Despite its opponents’ claims that people used the software to post lewd or libelous comments, Third Voice didn’t go down in a lawsuit. The company’s conundrum was much more banal: Third Voice couldn’t generate enough advertising revenue to raise consumers’ awareness of its free service, and it couldn’t generate enough consumer awareness to raise the advertising revenue it needed to stay in business.

Now, in this age of Web 2.0, social bookmarking and user generated commentary is all the rage. Diigo isn’t the only one that’s adding notes to webpages. Stickis by Activeweave is doing something similar.

There is a problem for companies operating in this space. Techcrunch expresses it thus:

Many of the bookmarking sites are starting to blur together for me… there are multiple companies already attacking the space with vigor. Good luck to all. It’s going to be a long, hard fight. With perhaps as much as a $30 million payout at the end of the day.

I’ve got used to using del.icio.us and now that it’s owned by Yahoo, it can afford to add more and more useful features. It would be hard for me to break the habit and swap to a new service now. But there are lots of people who are yet to discover the delights of social bookmarking.

However, if you put the idea of post-it notes on a web page together with Microsoft Vista’s new paper-like visual abilities, I think you can discern a trend which leads to web pages looking and behaving more and more like real paper. To close the loop, you need to make paper behave more like web pages.

“Use Mytago and convert your phone into a magic bookmarking and tagging tool. Use bookmarks from the offline world for online sharing and exploring. Connect your offline and online worlds.”

Mytago is a piece of software that you can load onto one of the new smartphones that are becoming “devices for life.” It makes use of the inbuilt camera to scan text, pictures and symbols. I find it hard to understand how the text part fits in (perhaps somebody can enlighten me), but the “tag” idea is straightforward enough:

“During the day, you see a Mytago tag on a poster of an event of your interest. You scan it by taking a snapshot with your mobile phone camera as a bookmark for the event. Later at home, you transfer the tag to your laptop and upload it to mytago.com and get all the details about the event.”

Another similar idea comes from the oddly but memorably named Smartpox. (I suppose they are hoping that their name will go viral). The Smartpox code is a square barcode that you can print in the real world of posters and newspapers. Suppose you are a band promoting a single. Users point their mobile phone camera at your Smartpox and hear a sample of your music.

Mashable makes an important point:

“The concept makes a lot of sense, although it isn’t exactly new. In fact, all these systems suffer from a serious chicken and egg problem: there’s no point in creating a code unless a decent number of people have the reader, and there’s no point in getting the reader unless there are plenty of codes around. So while Smartpox is a forward-looking idea, I don’t see it taking off in a big way.”

But despite the skepticsm, Japan provides an example that shows that this sort of thing can take off. QR Codes can now be accessed via camera phones. According to the Wikipedia, they are cropping up frequently in Japanese magazine advertisements and on business cards. You can even find them on the wrappers of Japanese McDonald’s burgers.

Exbiblio is clearly operating in the same space – but it’s ingeniously using text as the unique identifier. I see this as a huge advantage because you don’t have to create special barcodes, and any line of text is potentially a hyperlink. The weakness, in my view, is that you have to buy a scanner pen, and then remember to take it with you when you go out. This is quite a big egg for the chicken to lay. (I remind readers here that I’m an outside blogger, and I’ve been asked recently to give a few more of my own opinions). It seems to me that software that can be loaded onto camera phones is a fast expanding business model. I mentioned recently that you can use the video camera in the latest Nokia to analyse your golf swing. This is the sort of thing that is really taking off now.

Finally, my thanks to the skeptical Dead 2.0 where I read about these phone-scanners. I leave you with his thoughts on barcodes – and I think it’s fair to say that Exbiblio is addressing these issues:

“I’d rather see one of these company build a real-time scanner than can pick up the URL or email address off something printed than go through this rigmarole. Oh, one last thing, to ensure them the proper place in Web 2.0 land, they added in social networking features as well. Cuz there ain’t nothing more fun than having friends share UPC codes with each other.”

I’ve just signed up to try out the New Times’s Times Reader as soon as it becomes available. Wired News has already had a preview of the software:

The Times Reader, which will soon be released as beta software, is a souped-up version of “real” paper by way of tomorrow’s web technology. The application attempts to provide an onscreen reading experience that is as familiar as the printed page, only more versatile and interactive.

I find it quite hard to get a feel of what the Times Reader will be like from Wired’s description – but it seems that you will able to browse a frequently updated RSS feed like a newspaper, from the front page to the back, and the pages will refresh immediately. In essence, it will look and feel like the paper edition of the New York Times. The reader is being built with Microsoft’s latest technology. It will take advantage of Windows Vista’s new visual capabilities. There will be a service pack for Windows XP that will enable it in advance of the much delayed new operating system.

Microsoft’s efforts in this direction have already been attacked by blogger Jeff Jarvis. He believes that news should (and is becoming) disaggregated, in the sense that you can hop from one news provider to the other for each story. This is what Google News is doing. It’s breaking up the hierarchy of news publishers.

Still, it seems to me that nothing on screen yet beats the enjoyment of reading a real newspaper. And I’m somebody who spends a good chunk of my day using an RSS reader. I jump around the “disaggregated” world of news because I’m scouring for stories. It’s what I call “work”. I still buy a morning newspaper, and enjoy my half an hour of peace and quiet on the sofa with the “real thing.” What bothers me most about print is that the price keeps on going up – otherwise I would probably buy more than one newspaper. But there’s no way that I’m going to sit at my hot computer for pure relaxation – unless, that is, the Times Reader is really very good. I’ll let you know when I’ve tried it.

Kids in the South of France are going back to school this term with memory sticks that they will use to carry their homework back and forth. The sticks will also be pre-loaded with selected school texts. According to The Times:

Every September there is an outcry from parents as children stagger back to school under the load of new books. College, or junior secondary pupils, typically carry about 10kg (22lb) in their cartables (satchels). Primary children carry 4-6kg.

It’s a small step from a memory stick to a scanner pen.

I mentioned recently that Britain’s Daily Telegraph has designed its new office for the multi-media age. Now it’s launched its new evening paper in down-loadable PDF format. It calls the concept “Click and Carry” and it’s designed to print out on A4 so that you can run it off on the office printer and read it on the train home. If you are reading it online, you will find video and audio options, including an audio / video slideshow. Telegraph pm is published at 4pm each day. Look for it in the right column of the Telegraph’s sleek website.

The Telegraph has perfectly combined the advantages of both of digital and paper – but it does so in the reverse fashion to Exbiblio. Under the Exbiblio vision, you buy the paper version, you take out your scanner pen on the train, capture some signature text, dictate some notes into the pen, and then later, when you sit down at your computer, your scanner pen takes you to the digital version. When you live in a Telegraph world, you go to the computer first, and then if you want to read it on the train, you print off a copy. You underline anything that you want to note for later with your ball-point pen. So we have two visions, each a perfect inverse of the other. Which is seeing the world the right way round? I have to admit that the Telegraph’s logic has a lot to be said for it. It’s the way we behave now. Many of us graze articles on the the Internet, but print longer pieces that we might want to read in depth or notate. Exbiblio is asking people to change their behaviour. Your views please….

There was a SmartPhone Summit in LA yesterday. Phones on display included the new Nokia N93 Golf Edition that can analyse your golf swing and compare it to that of a pro. Over at All About Symbian, a community site for mobile software, you will find a host of ideas for your phone: GPS positioning, medical encyclopedias, blood pressure tracking, and even ebooks by authors including Mark Twain and Charles Dickens.

Using your phone as a camera, video recorder, MP3 Player, email client, and PDA, is already fairly mainstream. The question is how many more tricks can be packed into the box. Is there room for a neat little scanner?

I mentioned recently that Amazon might be going into the video download business. Now it’s made its move with a service called Amazon Unbox. Dave Taylor does a good walk-through of the service.

Amazon is becoming the hub for both digital and paper media, and as Robert Scoble mentions, it is pushing out innovations as fast as Google does. If anyone is in a strong position to make links across the divide between paper and digital, it’s Seattle’s biggest books store.