Over the last few weeks I’ve been trialling a product called the Papershow from Oxford (the chaps that make those nice Black & Red notebooks so beloved of we consultants).

The product is basically a fancy pen with clever paper and a USB key for your PC. When you write or draw on the paper, it is reproduced on your screen in the Papershow application.

So basically you can use it like an ordinary pad of paper for collaboarative design, sketching, writing, etc. But obviously as you write, everything is copied to your PC and/or beamed onto a big screen. You can also change colours, delete previous actions, draw rectangles, ellipses, arrows, etc.

You can also print out existing presentations on to the Papershow paper and import them into the application. This allows you to annotate the presentations live – an the annotations appear in exactly the right place on the screen. There’s a brief demo below:

I can imagine this sort of application being really great for people who need to collaborate on the design of something – perhaps a user interface, or a graphic for an ad campaign. You could also use it to capture meeting minutes or actions electronically without the pain of typing.

I’ve used similar technologies before – but this is far simpler. What I’d used previously required seperate synchronisation/docking and/or the transmission of the data over the mobile phone network: it was fiddly and often failed. This just works with no fuss.

I believe the retail price will be around £140 – so well within the budget of any small business. And because the application runs from the USB key provided, you can run it on anyone’s PC.

I must admit, I don’t see an immediate use in my business. When I’m with clients I do a lot of sketching, scribbling and pencil-selling but to be honest, I would feel the presence of technology to be a barrier between me and my client. I want them either looking at the paper I’m drawing on, or looking at me – rather than a computer screen. But for people invoved in creating graphical products in teams – user interfaces, websites, brochures etc. I can imagine it would be a great help. You can discuss, collaboratively design; and even hand the pen over to “users” who don’t know how to use your graphics programs – yet they can still add to the outputs easily by using the normal human activity of drawing.

Ian

PS – for more information about the product go to Papershow