It may be hard to imagine using a smartpen for anything other than taking notes, but some of Livescribe’s most adorable customers don’t know how to read or write. You guessed it – kids!

Parents, grandparents, teachers and caregivers use Sound Stickers and smartpens to add audio recordings to greeting cards, flash cards and books. Using simple recording controls, you can record yourself reading a book, which your child can play back just by tapping the Sound Sticker with the smartpen. Unlike a book on tape, children can listen to one page over and over just by tapping on the sticker – no rewinding needed.

The best part is – it’s your voice. So whether you’re on a business trip or just trying to get dinner on the table – your children can listen to you reading Llama, Llama Red Pajama as many times as they want – independently.

Other ideas for sound stickers:

• In addition to reading the book, record questions, so the child demonstrates comprehension. Example questions:
• What do you think will happen next?
• Why was the little llama crying?
• How do you spell llama?
• Record the story with your children, so their voice is also part of the playback.
• Add Sound Stickers to your children’s artwork and have them narrate a story about what they’ve drawn.
• Have your older kids use Sound Stickers to record the audio for their younger siblings’ books, which helps them work on fluency, pronunciation, pauses, expression, sound effects, etc.

Check out this video of Livescribe smartpen Sound Stickers in action! How will you use Sound Stickers with your kids?

The Livescribe wifi smartpen (known as Sky in North America) and Echo were designed for different customers. Both smartpens capture everything you write and hear, and allow you to playback the information from pen and paper and from a computer. But there are important differences in how the smartpen’s notes, audio and pencasts are stored, managed and accessed.

The Livescribe wifi smartpen is designed as a cloud-centric smartpen. It’s a great tool for people who are always connected and are comfortable with cloud services, like Evernote. They need quick access to their notes and pencasts on all the devices they use, including smartphones, tablets and computers.

Echo, on the other hand, is a desktop-centric smartpen and is designed for customers who rely heavily on their personal computers. For customers who prefer using desktop software to store, organize and playback their notes and pencasts, the Echo smartpen is the right choice.

Take a look at the chart below for more details that will help you figure out which smartpen will work best for your lifestyle.

The good news – it’s simple. With a few taps of your smartpen, you can archive any notebooks you’ve filled, so you can clear memory on your smartpen and use the same numbered notebooks again. To learn how it works, please read the instructions here.

As a startup, we’re always learning, evolving and growing. Because we’re small, we are nimble enough to switch directions when we’re headed down the wrong path.

When we launched, we fully intended to introduce Sky customers to Pencast PDF, a portable file format that allows pencasts to be stored locally, played back offline and easily shared. This was also how we had planned to enable the WiFi Share buttons printed on the cover of the Starter Notebook. However, since launch, we have discovered that more than 70% of Sky customers use an iPhone® or iPad® regularly. Because Pencast PDF uses Flash, it has become apparent Pencast PDF is not the right solution for our WiFi smartpens.

Although we won’t be developing Pencast PDF for Sky, there are plenty of sharing options directly in Evernote®. We are evaluating other options that can offer local storage and offline playback across all the platforms our customers use. We hope to have more news in the coming months.

In the meantime, we will continue to make improvements and enhancements to all aspects of the Sky wifi smartpen. Stay tuned for more updates.

Thank you for your patience and continued support.
– Gilles Bouchard

For starters, we know that syncing over WiFi is helpful, but it’s a bit tougher if there’s no WiFi around! That’s the big news in Livescribe Helper 1.1: You can now sync your notes to the cloud from any Mac or Windows computer that has an internet connection! This is a big help when you’re on a wired connection, or if you’re on a WiFi network that needs web authentication. Now, if you’ve got access to a PC that’s online – say, a laptop that’s signed in to your school’s wireless network, or your wired office computer – just connect your smartpen with your USB cable and Livescribe Helper will sync your notes and audio to your Evernote account. It’s the same simple sync, but now it works in more of the places that you work.

Livescribe Helper is the fastest and easiest way to make sure your smartpen is getting all of the latest features and updates we’re making, including firmware tweaks and minor bug fixes. It’s completely free to download, and you can take advantage of it right here, on our website:

http://bit.ly/W0tlct

To get started, visit the link above and select “Download Livescribe Helper” for your platform of choice. Download, install, and follow the step-by-step instructions in Livescribe Helper to get your smartpen up to speed!

Some say handwriting is an indicator of one’s personality. Proponents of graphology (the study of handwriting) believe that everything about your writing, from the pressure you put on the pen to the spacing between your words, can indicate how well you socialize, analyze, or prioritize!

Notes are a big part of your handwriting, of course. After all, your style of note-taking is purely your own, filled with all of the quirks and habits that make up your thought process, allowing you to pick out what you need just by looking at the bits and pieces you’ve written. Still, handwriting is good for more than just notes, and today, on National Handwriting Day, it’s worth remembering what else a pen and paper can do for you.

Whether or not your innermost secrets are contained within your handwriting, the fact remains that it comes in a style uniquely your own. When you write a letter or note or signature by hand, your loved ones will recognize who it came from – and that you cared enough to slow down, take your time, and put your thoughts on paper to share exactly what you wanted to say to them.

So, today, on National Handwriting Day, why not take a moment to write someone a letter, a thank-you note, or a friendly greeting? Use that nice stationery you’ve been hanging on to, or leave a sticky note on the fridge for someone, or just grab your smartpen and dot paper to put a few good thoughts into writing – and save a stamp by sending the personal note via email.

What will your writing say about you today?

Have you ever promised yourself that you’d start a new fitness regimen, only to find a handful of excuses to ditch the treadmill this week… and the next week… and so on, until you ask yourself why you’re paying a gym membership at all? Many workout guides suggest enlisting the aid of a friend to get yourself motivated and inspired – and to keep you honest. Of course, if you count your online friends among your fitness buddies, there’s no end to the support you can find! Consider starting a Shared Notebook on Evernote, where you and a group of health-minded folks can put up logs and notes from your daily workouts and routines. If one of you doesn’t add their notes on a given day, the rest of the group will see you missing in action, and is sure to give you the pep talk (or the swift kick in the hindquarters) you need.

Of course, just as important as the calories you burn are the calories you’re taking in! It’s easy to watch what you eat when you’re at home, preparing your own meal, but many of us lose track of our nutrition when we’re out during the day. The local deli or the campus cafeteria might not have a calorie count posted for you to consider when you’re grabbing lunch, but if you carry a smartpen with you, it’s a simple task to jot down the contents of your meal. Be honest about it, too; don’t leave out the extra dressing you put on your salad, or that big hunk of sourdough that came with your soup! Then, with those notes automatically synced to the cloud, you can do the research the next time you’re in front of a browser (lots of restaurants share nutritional info on their websites even if you don’t see it on location). Count up those calories and check out what you’re really eating in a given meal. You might be very surprised!

Speaking of syncing, don’t forget that while you might need an internet connection to sync your notes to the cloud, your smartpen can write, record, and play back its saved recordings from just about anywhere, Wi-Fi-friendly or not! If you’ve got some thoughts to write down, why not take that writing session somewhere you can get a little exercise? Running might not let you hold your notebook steady, but a stationary bicycle might just fit the bill!

What have you been doing to stay healthy for this month? Whatever it is, there’s no reason to stop once February arrives!

December is “Write a Friend Month,” and with the holidays upon us, now is the perfect time to send notes to loved ones. We’re all busy this time of year of course, but dashing off a note to a friend or loved one is a great opportunity to skip the long lines at the mall and the post office and instead reflect what really matters during the holiday season. Why not personalize your letters by handwriting them and adding audio using a smartpen? Below we’ve outlined a different few ways you can observe “Write a Friend Month” using a smartpen to create personalized, interactive notes.

1. Write letters to friends and family: Family and friends, especially those with whom you’ve fallen out of touch, will love receiving a handwritten note with a special audio message the smartpen can record. Email the pencast to loved ones for a message that really pops.  
2. Write letters to those who need them most: The holidays can be a difficult time for those who are away from their families or who have lost loved ones. Let a stranger know you care by sending a letter to a soldier in the military, or an elderly person who’s away from their family to brighten their holiday season.
3. Send out holiday pencasts: Instead of sending out three-page long year’s end summaries in your Christmas cards, why not email quick and breezy pencasts along with Christmas photos to your loved ones? Families can record messages for their recipients – a great way for little ones who aren’t reading or writing yet to add their own personal message.
4. Write a note to a favorite teacher: While students are wrapping up the semester and looking forward to a nice holiday break, most teachers will be busy grading assignments and finals over the winter vacation. Distract them from their grading woes by sending a quick note to a favorite teacher, letting them know how they’ve positively influenced you and how much you appreciate their hard work. Extra credit for spelling everything right. 
5. Send a virtual postcard pencast during holiday traveling: There’s never enough room to write your message on those tiny little postcards anyway, so bring your smartpen and a Livescribe notebook on your vacation this holiday season and record everything you couldn’t squeeze onto the card into a pencast to email to loved ones. If you’re travelling to a foreign country, try your hand at a few key phrases the native language. Benissimo!

You’ll need to assemble a proper holiday feast for your friends and family. Depending on your celebration of choice, you may be preparing turkey, latkes, or maybe even an hors d’oeuvres table with mini-quiche and brie en croute. It’s time to dig up those recipe cards that your family’s been passing down for years and review your preparation notes! This year might be a good time to save those family culinary traditions to the cloud, so you can quickly look up the ones you need. Better still, you might consider adding Sound Stickers to your existing cards, so you can keep mom’s cooking advice handy for the next time you need to listen to her.

Your annual gift list is another thing that usually gets written down on the fly, with ideas for the perfect present coming to you when you least expect it. Wouldn’t it be nice if, once you had that idea recorded, you could get quick and easy access to it from your phone once you were actually at the mall? Someone should get you that ability as a present. Any ideas?

If you are still stuck in school for another week or two, of course, you’ll be intimately familiar with just how many notes you’ve been taking lately. Everything you’ve learned for the last three months is going to be tested shortly, and now you’ve got to review your notes – notes from lectures, notes from your labs or projects, notes on your homework assignments… and notes on who in your study group is responsible for taking and bringing notes! (Perhaps you might consider sharing your group’s notes online through Evernote?)

Thankfully, handwritten notes are still a quick, simple way to get all of this information down on paper, and just like every year, we know you’ll come through the holidays just fine, with all of your writing done and your tasks and plans completed… just in time to start writing down your New Year’s resolutions.

Simply put, cloud computing refers to digital applications, storage, and services that take place over a network, rather than needing to be rooted on your personal computer or devices. The Cloud helps us access the digital stuff we need for work, for play, and for creativity, no matter where we are and what device we’re using.

You see it all the time at work: have you ever emailed a file to yourself so you could work on it at home? Whether or not you realize it, that’s cloud computing! You’re not personally operating an email server on your computer; the server is hosted over an internet-accessible network, “in the cloud,” so you can pull up that email-stored file from your home PC, or even your smartphone or tablet.

It’s the same story in video games, too – if you’ve spent the last six hours finishing an epic quest, you don’t want to lose that progress if you move to a different computer. Thankfully, a lot of modern games keep your saves in the cloud, so no matter where you play from, you keep the same campaign. Gone, too, are the days when you’d have to buy a new copy of a song every time you updated your mp3 player (thank goodness).

That’s what we wanted to achieve with Sky. Once you’ve written down your notes, you should be able to review them anywhere, from any device. Having your Evernote account in the cloud means once that information is synced, you can access your notes from any Evernote-friendly device, whether it’s a tablet, smartphone, laptop, or desktop PC.

The next time someone tells you that you have your head in the clouds, you can just smile and say, “Well, sure. Don’t you?”

Harry McCracken, TIME: “While I’ve always admired their ingenuity, I’ve never liked my own handwriting enough to be excited about the notion of preserving it. But the wi-fi is slick, and I store my notes in Evernote anyhow — so this is the first incarnation of the idea I can see working its way into my everyday routine. I’m going to give it a try, anyhow.”

David Pierce, The Verge: “It’s the best Livescribe tool ever, by a long shot, making your analog notes digital in a really useful way. I hate nothing so much as transcribing entire interviews or digging through meeting notes just to find the one thing I needed to remember, and spending a couple of weeks with the Sky showed me a future where I’ll never have to again.”

Christina Bonnington, WIRED: “For someone who prefers to write by hand but needs that written information online, this could be a godsend. The only thing better would be if notes were automatically transcribed into text — and that’s something the company says it’s working on for Q1 2013.”

Leslie Horn, Gizmodo: “This is something I wish had existed when I was in college. I would have been a much better student.”

Have you had a chance to meet Sky yet?