Livescribe Echo

The wave of the future?

Knowing my affinity for writing instruments, my husband showed me an article about pens in his Bloomberg Businessweek magazine, entitled No Country for Old Pens.  The title intrigued me but upon reading the article, I thought the title writer must have experienced a bit of disconnect from the article itself, which was about the newest digital writing tools and applications.  From the article:

To save your handwritten pages, the Echo requires paper with a faint pattern of powder-blue dots—a technology developed by Anoto, a Livescribe partner. (The tiny camera below the nib uses those dots as reference points.) Livescribe offers on its site. . .special notebooks and Moleskine-style bound journals. . .

At $199 a crack, I'm not likely to be the owner of a Livescribe Echo anytime soon, but reading about it did make me think about the possible applications for 'live scribes' AKA calligraphers.