![]() One wonders if Anoto will tell you that the product you are buying from their website is actually a product from one of their partners! But make no mistake, if you buy that you are tied to Penvision and their development and updates. But when you get the user manual for that product it turns out to be nothing but XMS Penvision’s Formidable product. In a somewhat similar fashion Anoto claims to have a Forms Solution product. Talerio has written the LivePDF product but Anoto claims it as their own. So what do they do? They buy up those firms that are successful in writing software. ![]() Mistake Four: Anoto simply can’t write their own software.Įvery piece of end user software that Anoto has written has been an abject failure. That’s better, but still a long way to go to meet the general demands of users. People hated their old desktop software, but now there is the new Echo desktop, or Anoto’s LivePDF. Livescribe: well, there has always been grumbling about their software. Why is there no decent stand-alone product that is updated on a regular basis? As such, when Anoto is done with them, they simply turn them off. These products are often “cloud” based and require Internet connections. So if you had things all set up for PenDocumentsPro you simply found yourself with a dead piece of software. But Anoto then goes and buys Talerio and they create a new product called LivePDF. Talerio had a product called PenDocumentsPro. The same is also true for the software that Anoto has produced or marketed. If you owned a Logitech pen and still have XP and proper paper, you can still use the software that came with your pen (from, say, 2007) but there isn’t any other way to use your pen. Mistake Three: Software comes and goes with no stability. If you are going to spend $150 to $300 on a digital pen, you’d like it to work for more than just 2 to 3 years! Your pen is a nice paperweight, or you can keep an XP box around just for it. You actually could get them to work but you had to really do your homework to figure it all out. When Vista came out, the pens no longer worked. The Logitech IO and IO2 pens had drivers that would work in Windows XP. Mistake Two: Drivers are not updated to new OSes. Each pen locks you into specific types of paper, OSes, drivers, etc. Livescribe has three pens and Anoto sells at least 2 to 3 different pens. Keep in mind that Nokia had a pen, and that was cancelled. If you write on Livescribe paper with an IO2 pen, it won’t work and vice versa. If you have a Livescribe pen, then the same thing. So if you have a Logitech IO2, you better have Logitech pen related paper. The pens, however, have firmware that restricts what range of pages they can recognize. Think of those pages as each having an IP address. The paper contains a unique set of dots printed as a ‘watermark’. To make these pens work you need four things 1) the pen itself, 2) paper with the dot pattern upon it, 3) a driver to download the data from the pen and 4) a software application that would manage the documents and convert handwriting, etc. ![]() The two basic pens were called “Consumer” pens while the Bluetooth pen was considered “Commercial”. Apparently those pens are still made by an Anoto owned subsidiary (Destiny UK), but they are no longer a widely available consumer product. Here we had one of the largest manufacturers of high tech gear get into the pen market only to quickly withdraw from it. Mistake One: Too many pens, too many restrictions on their use.Ĭase in Point: Logitech IO and IO2 pens (and IO Bluetooth pen). What mistakes has Anoto made with respect to their pen and software offerings? Let’s just review a few of them. Instead, let’s just assume for the moment that the Anoto digital pen platform is a great concept and could be a winner for a number of vertical markets. In this paper I don’t want to focus so much on the business uses of digital pens and how they have changed. Eight Reasons why Anoto digital pens have been a FailureĪnoto has been in business for over 10 years, yet most people have never seen a digital pen and most certainly have never heard of Anoto.
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