Livescribe on Twitter

If you are a journalist, lawyer, salesperson, or educator and you are willing to share how you use Pulse, D me your email.

This screen shot illustrates the conversations you could be starting with not only your existing customers, but also potential customers.

With Twitter, Livescribe is participating in useful question and answer, ad they’re broadcasting their smart, user-centric product development to the public.

Livescribe makes smartpens. The pens record what you hear while you write. Touch something you wrote and the pen plays back that moment of the audio recording. Check out the power and potential in an amazing flash playback here.

I heard of them from Kathleen Danielson. She’s a student who started using one a month ago and seems pleased. I don’t use a Livescribe pen — not yet — but I started following Livescribe on Twitter because it looked like a cool gadget. I have since been impressed with how the development of the technology has played out in Livescribe’s conversations with real users.

Livescribe, like Twitter itself, is essentially a tool for easily recording bits of information about what we’re doing, from multiple sources, and linking them together for playback, search, and sharing with others. These kinds of technologies are limited only by their users’ creativity.

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Multitasking, online tools, and focus: your mileage may vary

Gina Trapani of Lifehacker muses on whether and how much the Web, email, and the like help or hurt personal productivity:

Over the few years this site’s been in existence, studies have shown that email kills concentration more than smoking pot does, that you’ve got 11 minutes before the next interruption, that dual monitors increase productivity, that no one understands the intended tone of your email, that email overload costs the American economy more than $700 billion a year, and that multitasking kills your ability to focus and get things done.

The longer I do this, the more I suspect that a good part of the
“information overload” story is a myth cooked up by folks who don’t
know how to use the internet well in order to demonize something they
don’t understand. I get more done via email and surfing the web than my
parents ever did using phones and libraries, even when I’m having a bad
day and switch to my email application the moment I see a new message
notification.

I debate this a lot for myself. I’ve recently stopped using Twitter, but around the same time I started using instant messaging (IM) to send quick notes (mostly with coworkers). Twitter was definitely draining my attention, and not using it has freed up both time and brain cycles. But IM has been a wonderful tool, particularly for communicating quickly with team members — even when they’re sitting just a few feet away from me (it’s a terrific way to send a link).

So there are no easy answers, and everyone must use these tools differently. Still, I can’t imagine a world without the Web. And even if there weren’t a Web, I’d still have found other ways to multitask.

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