It’s a Sticky! No it’s a Quickie!

An RFID Post-it note for the 21st century.

By Jessica Cheng Posted 05.02.2008 at 5:31 pm 3 Comments

Post-its are great to jot down quick notes and messages; and important phone numbers; and meeting locations; and the zillions of passwords. Great that is, until they lose their stick and end up buried in piles of work or behind the desk. Now, researchers at MIT have solved that pressing problem with the demoed “Quickies,” a new application to digitize handwritten sticky notes and allow you not only to browse through an archive of notes, but set up to-do lists, send reminders, and even find that sticky note you lost in the middle of a textbook.

The system uses commercially-available digital pens and special writing pads. As users jot on a typical Post-it note, the handwriting recognition software captures the message and stores it on the computer. These notes are then processed by the software and sorted into different types of notes. For instance, a note about the meeting would be added to a calendar; a note left for a friend would be sent as a text message (the computer searches through your address book to find name matches).

An additional feature of the Quickie is an RFID tag on the back of the sticky note. This helps readers track where they posted their sticky note—and help find it. In the video, the Quickie helps find a book with a RFID tagged sticky note—after searching for the note the program tells the user its location “2nd rack in the office.”

Now if only it will find the keys . . .

No word on when it could hit the market, but learn more at pranavmistry.com

Via Engadget

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3 Comments

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ford2go

05/04/08 at 12:43 am

Sounds like a solution in search of a problem -- or a "reinvention of the purpose of 'stickies'" (or Post-Its(tm) as my former employer and Post-It(tm) inventor would have it.
(I'm retired)

Anyway, the general sticky concept is a quick temporary reminder -- get milk, meet Brad, call Jenny at 827-5309.
Stuff like that. They're pretty good for that.

And they're pretty good for brainstorming, where you have a lot of ideas or tasks that interrelate, but you don't have the exact details of how. Pop up a bunch o' stickies, and move them around until everyone more or less agrees.

For long term organization -- not so good. Copy the important stuff to something more permanent and easy to track. Sure, you automatically track these notes --if you write them on the reader attached to your compute. Well, isn't that convenient. (And let's not even speculate on a reader integrated into your cell phone)

As for the RFID, well now there's a slight costup. IF, RFID tags were available for a penny each ( last I looked, they were a lot spendier than that), you've really added some cost to your basic note. Multiply the cost x 5 to get the retail price, and you can see where that goes.

I'm not a tech nay sayer, in fact, I love tech. But, it's hard for me to envision just how these things would make anbody's life easier. Maybe a real world example would be enlightening.

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pranavmistry

05/05/08 at 10:44 am

To Jessica,

A newer and better video of Quickies is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQT5_4aVvHU.

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e9000

05/11/08 at 10:46 pm

If you used those things all you would be doing is wasting your time on the computer checking if you did something that you already know you did

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