The digital era in the physical world

The digital revolution and its digitization of information has not turn down all our “physical habits” and many of us, both in the personal and professional sphere, are attached to some “old” way of doing things. The e-book has not completely destroyed the book, the mp3 has not substituted Live Concert and laptops/tablets have not become a notebook substitue for everybody.

However, digital technologies has brought many vantages and enhancements to our society. If mp3 has not replaced LiveConcert, it has contributed to the massive broadcast of world music and the democratization of music creation, and so on for the e-book. Examples where digital has changed the way we build, share and look at things are almost infinite.

The thing is that, as mentioned in a previous article, the Digital Revolution is a progressive phenomenon with complex effects on our society. Moreover, our relation to technology is not simply as well, and changes with cultures, people or activities.
Therefore, our relation to the digital era is not easily described and is moving according to many factors. The technology and innovation offer is one of them.

As a matter of fact, the technological products offer is taking an active part in the building of our relation with the digital world.
A good example is the Internet of Thing. This new wave of connected products is a perfect example of the incursion of digital systems into our physical world, an embeddedness of the digital into the physical.

Reconcile the Digital and Physical World

There is a delay between Technology Evolution and Habits Evolution. This delay could probably be explained by the skyrocketing growth of ICTs.
As a result, a lots of individuals are struggling to fully adopt new Digital tools and embrace the digitization of their company. Therefore they stick to old working schemes that had proven to be effective.
The “learning cost” for people to constantly adopt new digital tools is sometimes considered too hight to be profitable.

What can be made to change this stat of arts?
A solution is to include traditional way of working, doing things, into new tools and processes.

An interesting example is the integration of LiveScribe and MyScript to Beesy.

With this partnership, Livescribe and BeesApps aim to bridge the traditional gap in business between traditional tools, more precisely paper notes, and the digital world.

More than a simple combination of Handwriting and Digital advantages, the use of the LiveScribe 3 smartpen with Beesy is opening the gates of Application physical control. This new way of controlling Digital Tools can be the mean for professionals to embrace the Digital era while keeping and enhancing their traditional legacy, in terms of work.

More precisely, the idea is to avoid double input of the same information. One way to prevent that is to simply input directly information to the digital system, but as explained before, professionals habits evolves slower than digital systems and therefore, a lot of people still works with handwritten Notes while working with many digital tools. As a result, people spend many times entering handwritten information into digital devices.
With the combination of a Smartpen (LiveScribe), a Handrwitten Recognition technology (MyScript) and Note Taking and Task management Tool (Beesy), the information, taken once, goes instantly from the Smartpen to the productivity tool through a recognition system and appear as an actionnable and editable item within the professional digital information flow.

This kind of interaction between the physical and digital world might be the future of working, or maybe a transition phase to the full digital era, who knows?

Image Credits:
“Pure Data File Killer” by Antonio Roberts
“data.path” by r2hox