I’m very pleased to advise that Livescribe founder and CEO Jim Marggraff will be visiting Australia next week.
The Livescribe team has kindly organised a social event with Jim on Monday night the 17th February.
This is a great opportunity to meet Jim and some of the team – including the Smartpen team.
I hope to see you there.
I’m pleased to announce that the Livescribe 4GB Pulse Smartpen is now available in Australia.
The 4GB Smartpen is in the new Titanium colour.
The introduction of the 4GB Pulse Smartpen also marks the introduction of new packaging for the pen and a slight change in what’s included with the basic package. The key difference is a change to the standard notebook – it’s now an A5 black spiral bound notebook.
Note that we’ve also created a bundled solution to include MyScript for Livescribe. MyScript for Livescribe has been incredibly popular here in Australia and New Zealand and I highly recommend it.
Still no word on the 4GB Pro Pack – but when we do find out I’ll let everyone know.
Finally, initial orders of the Livescribe 4GB Pulse Smartpen Titanium are likely to be slower than usual dispatch – I’ll advise individual customers directly.
Seeing as I’ve given away my original Pulse Smartpen I’m going to upgrade to the 4GB – I’ll blog here in a few weeks with my initial thoughts.
I hope to have confirmed information re general availability of the 4GB pen within the next two weeks. Once I have a confirmed date for stock, we’ll open up the store for pre-orders.
Here’s an image of the 4GB in the new colour
Firstly, the RRP for the 2GB pen has been reduced to $299 (including GST). This is in time for us to help out the flood of new students entering university as well as many of our Government and corporate users who are completing trials of the Pulse Smartpen within their operations.
You may also have noticed that we’ve added the A4 and A5 pads into the store – it’s nice having metric paper products at last…
The really important development though is that we’ve been working on some innovative ideas for where we see the Pulse Smartpen going – particularly now that the software development kit is out there. I’m going to share some ideas with you in January about how we see the technology being used in education and business.
We’re in the final stages of a pretty significant development to help us help you better. The first part of this will be the launch of an Australian support wiki. This wiki will contain FAQ’s, community feedback, as well as tools to help us solve some of the occasional problems that emerge with the pen and desktop. One of the core reasons we’re doing this is that we’re a pretty industrious bunch down here so I’m very keen to tap that inquisitive nature so that we all can benefit.
This won’t replace the support resources on the Livescribe site but will augment them and be focused on the issues that we track from you the customer.
Another key goal of the wiki will be to create an interactive environment where we can collaborate to develop policies around how Livescribe can be used by students.
One of my core goals is to develop a framework of information and policies that schools, TAFE’s, and Universities can then refer to or use so that everyone understands what the Livescribe Pulse Smartpen does and how it can be used to help the learning experience.
We added two new products into our store today.
The standard spiral notebooks have been updated as we now have the A4 packs available. This is a good update for our regional customers as it standardises our most popular pad product with metric conventions.
Like the previous spiral pad products they are sold as a pack of .
If you’re currently using the spiral notebooks 1-4, then you can go straight onto the new A4 version when you need further books.
Extending the range of paper products we offer we now have the A5 pads available in packs of 4.
I first saw these a few months ago and they are a really good addition to the paper products range. Many users have commented that they like using the spiral notebooks – so these A5 pads are a great alternative for those of us who don’t want to lug around the bulkier books. I’m sure they will prove popular.
We’ll get our first shipment of both products in early January
We had a spike in phone calls and emails yesterday and we’ve narrowed it down to the fact that Australian TV ran the Oprah show where she featured the Livescribe Pulse Smartpen.
This episode of the Oprah show went to air in the US a month or so ago, so whilst it wasn’t news for us – it was good to see it generated a lot of interest down here.
Here’s the episode if you missed it:
So if you saw Oprah and the Livescribe Pulse Smartpen and you’d like more info – feel free to contact us and we’ll see if we can help you out
On the weekend Livescribe released version 2.0 (2.033886) of the Livescribe Desktop application. In conjunction with this new version, they also launched the Livescribe app store (post to follow).
NOTE – there are some current problems downloading v2. If you experiencing difficulties please let us know. These problems may persist until the 24th or 25th November
I did manage to download and get a version working on one of my machines and I have to say I’m really impressed.
Here are the points that I think stand out:
Overall, I’m giving the new version an 8.5 out of 10.
There are still a few navigation tweaks I think need to be included and some bigger ideas around how the content is organised.
But in the meantime – well done Livescribe team.
Not sure how this one slipped under my radar but last month Livescribe was recognised in the list of winners in Wall Street Journals Technology Innovation Awards for 2009
Livescribe was recognised in the consumer electronics section with a runner-up award.
It’s great to see Livescribe being recognised around the world. Given what we expect to see in 2010 from Livescribe I wouldn’t be surprised to see further recognition.
Keep up the good work team
We’ve had a few requests from the community about whether Livescribe Desktop will work with Windows 7.
If you have upgraded to Windows 7 (we will be shortly) and you have a Livescribe Pulse Smartpen – then you’re in luck.
Livescribe Desktop v1.7 is compatible with Windows 7. To get Livescribe Desktop v1.7, simply go to the Livescribe website and follows the links through the Support section of the site.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to drop us a line
If you’re an existing Livescribe Pulse Smartpen user, you would have received an email from Livescribe today about the new products coming through the system.
Great news from the team and a reflection of how they listen and react to market feedback!
Not surprisingly we’ve already fielded dozens of calls, emails, and Tweets about when the 4GB will be available here – stay tuned as I don’t have details yet.
Here are the key points about the news this week:
As we learn more about these new products we’ll share it here first.
Great news through today from the Livescribe team with the announcement of a new model – the Livescribe 4GB Pulse Smartpen.
This latest model will record up to 400 hours of audio.
We don’t have any details as to availability here in Australia or pricing. Once we do we’ll let everyone know.
In addition to this, Smartpen will be introducing a number of new product bundles aimed at business and academic/student users. These new bundles will include the current Livescribe Pulse Smartpen plus the most popular accessories based on the sales data that we’ve collected over the past 15 months of sales.
