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Jun 19

MIT Modernizes Post-it Notes

This article was written on May 02, 2008 by CyberNet.

Ever since Post-it notes became popular in the 1980′s by 3M, no one has really managed to modernize them. I guess that saying “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” applies here. There’s never been any reason to try and come up with something better because Post-it notes just work! While it works, MIT must have thought there were ways to improve it and make it a little more modern because they’ve reinvented the Post-it note with something else called “Quickies.” As you can imagine, coming from MIT it’s all about the electronics involved.

TFOT Gives a good explanation of what Quickie is all about, and they also had some great pictures as well:

A newly-written Quickie is a simple Post-it note, which is scribed on a sensitive pad that allows the computer to capture and store the written information. This is done using commercially available digital-pen hardware, which translates the movement of the pen on the surface of the paper sticky note into digital information. The data can be viewed at any time through the Quickie software, which stores the sticky notes as images and converts the hand-written notes into computer-understandable text using available handwriting recognition algorithms.

mit quickies.png

Take a look at the video below and you’ll get a great idea of what the Quickies are all about:

After watching the video, I have to admit that it is impressive how text messaging and adding appointments to a calendar are so simple to use. And of course each note has got RFID embedded into so that they’ll be easy to locate, but is that what people are looking to do with their post-it notes? I noticed in the comments of the video that someone said, “one word, over-engineered” They pointed out how it’s simply not practical. While it’s definitely a cool concept, I think post-it notes are popular because they’re simple and they aren’t digitized.

Do you see this as something that could actually be useful? Or is this not what you’re looking for a post-it note to do?

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