MIT Tries To Re-invent The Post-It Note: Ends Up Keeping It May 2, 2008

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We all know the boffins at MIT have brains the size of planets but when it comes to reinventing one of the most useful office inventions of all time, they ended up just tweaking the original.

Meet the new, overhauled Post-It notes, or should I say ‘Quickies’, which take the incredibly useful originals and give them an electronic twist. Quickies are classed as intelligent Post-It notes, combining AI, RFID and ink-recognition technologies, but which still use the same format as the originals.

Here, you can write your ‘Gone To Lunch’ message to someone on a Post-It note but, instead off slapping it on their PC screen, your handwriting is interpreted by some special PC software and the message is forwarded to the person’s phone as an SMS, or to their PC screen.

The software recognises different types of notes and those for meetings reminders are automatically added to your calendar. The same with ‘To Do’ notes, while notes asking questions will set the software on a hunt for an answer which it will then print out for you. Think slow Googling. It seems to me that you can do a lot of this without Quickies but hey, they may catch on.

Not so much a Post-It note killer, but a well-earned Post-It note tribute.-Martin Lynch

[TFOT via Engadget]

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