I apparently bought in to one of the crowd-source funding items on IndieGogo (probably some bluetooth thingy to help me find my keys.  Have you seen my keys?) and so now get their “this product is HOT” updates.  This morning’s included one called Rocketbook Wave.  It’s pretty simple, really, although I’m sure the background technology is very complex:  it’s a notebook and pen.  One takes notes in the notebook as one would if one were handwriting one’s notes instead of typing them into a laptop or other device.  The pages and ink are optimized for image capture by your cellphone, 

and the image capture is automatically loaded into Rocketbook’s cloud storage system.

At first, this seems like a cumbersome process, and much less useful than, say, LiveScribe’s pen, which “records” what is written and allows playback of the same.  However, while recent studies confirm that handwritten material is better retained, one of the real drawbacks is living with all the paper that accumulates.  With this notebook, after you capture the images of the writing, you then microwave it to “erase” it, and start over.  (Sounds rather hygienic, too… I expect most of our devices and especially keyboards would benefit from a similar cleansing).

The concept is clearly popular, as the inventors have reached 3,562% of their funding goal at this writing.  I don’t think I’ll jump on the bandwagon quite yet but if you do, I hope you’ll let us know what you think!  The product is currently expected to ship in August of this year.