I stumbled across this interview with Apple Inventor, Steve Wozniak. He has a number of interesting things to say about inventions, but I think this thought bodes well for Exbiblio:

Then there’s the iPod. Its success is due to the fact that it’s a satellite to a computer: The computer has become absolutely central to our lives

Wozniak believes that many areas in technology are swamped and that perhaps there should only be a dozen companies making computers. The industry is mature, and it’s hard to come by new inventions. But clearly he believes that an invention that is a satellite to the computer has lots of mileage in it.

From what I’ve seen of Exbiblio’s technology, it is about making the good old-fashioned book orbit around the computer – in fact, if Exbiblio suceeds, the book will be the ultimate computer satellite, perhaps even cooler than the iPod.

Here is a time-lapse video (no sound) of myself using our prototype Kibble software. I am doing the following:

• Reading a printed Word document
• Selecting key phrases using a CPen 20 pen scanner
• (The phrases I scan are getting added to my life library)
• Adding note annotations to each scan
• Uploading the scans to a web server using a key code and then e-mailing the key code to the document’s author so that he can view my comments
• I am then attaching the digital version of the Word document to the scans in my library by dragging the document icon onto the library entry (this happens automatically in newer versions)
• When I click on a scan, Kibble is launching the digital version of the document on my hard drive and highlighting the portion of text that I captured with the CPen.

Currently at Exbiblio, the majority of the team is working on a project we call “Kibble” as in, eating your own dog food. Kibble is really a collection of projects involving use cases, design, hardware prototyping, and software prototyping.

When I say prototyping, what I really mean is hacking. We often implement features just one or two days after the design team requests them!.

The goal of Kibble is to prove to ourselves, investors, and eventually partners, that we can apply our technology in ways that are useful in real-world applications.

I’m part of the team that is rapidly implementing a Mac OS X application that stores, organizes, and provides actions based on text fragments captured out of printed materials using handheld scanners. Kibble also has a web component for sharing and accessing text captures from the web. We are using the CPen 20 to do the text captures for now, though we are also working on a prototype of a next generation line-by-line scanner.