Tech Table Monday, August 18, 2014
August 18, 2014
Justin: Welcome to MPA’s Tech Table. I’m Justin.
Diana: And I’m Diana.
Justin: And we’re your hosts. We’ll be serving up a heaping spoonful of all things tech.
Diana: We promise it’ll be easy to digest. Hi, Justin. It’s Monday.
Justin: It is Monday, Diana, and you seem revved up and ready to go.
Diana: Revved up, ready to go.
Justin: There you go. So, it’s Mail Monday, where we reach into our mail bag or rather our inbox. Yes, that’s a good sound effect you’re making there. Was that a mouse click? Is that what that was?
Diana: Yes, a mouse click.
Justin: Very good. So, what is the email address that people can send their questions to?
Diana: questions@askmpa.com
Justin: Right, that’s askmpa.com.
Diana: A-S-K-M-P-A.com
Justin: That’s right. So send your questions in, and we had a really good question, Donny actually got. Donny’s our front desk guy, and he’s kind of a guru of all things tech. I mean, he really knows a lot of stuff.
Diana: Yeah.
Justin: And he’ll make your life easier through technology.
Diana: Yes.
Justin: It may be complicated, his answer, but it will eventually make it easier.
Diana: Once you get a handle on it, yeah.
Justin: I mean, we have like a page and a half here that he wrote about this topic.
Diana: We do.
Justin: Which is great but yeah, so the question was: “An employee of our local government recently asked how she might be able to stay better organized and improve documentation during meetings.” You know, it’s hard if you’re taking the minutes or something of a meeting, just to stay on top of, you know, what’s going on the whole time. And Donny’s answer, and this is great, is “her Smartpen.”
Diana: Yes, he actually talked her into ordering the Smartpen that he had been using.
Justin: Right.
Diana: So, we’ll tell you a little bit about this Smartpen.
Justin: What is a Smartpen?
Diana: Well, it might sound like something that’s part of the future.
Justin: Right. It’s not, though. We have them.
Diana: But honestly, it’s today. It’s a power-packed computer that can rest at your fingertips and can offer you a lot of really, really great productivity advantages.
Justin: Right.
Diana: So there’s this company called Livescribe.
Justin: Livescribe.
Diana: Livescribe, and it’s now featuring their third generation of products. There’s some really super cool devices. Some of the products they have is Pulse, Sky, Echo, and the Livescribe 3 pen lines. Now, the Pulse is actually getting phased out. It’s taking the backseat to the newer Echo and the Sky pens, and then it also has been recently released, the Livescribe 3. And basically, the pens have the purpose to capture everything you write.
Justin: As well as everything you hear and put it all in one place.
Diana: Yes, there’s a special paper called a Dot Paper, and it works with an infrared camera that’s inside the pen to capture all of the strokes that you actually make with the pen.
Justin: So, it literally records it in a way.
Diana: Yes. Yes, and then there’s also a microphone that records audio.
Justin: Right, everything it hears.
Diana: So, what may be the best or the most popular feature in these pens is that those two items are connected: the infrared camera and the microphone. So, you can simply tap on your notes, wherever you wrote the notes. You can even make a note simple as a little doodle, okay?
Justin: Right.
Diana: So, tap there with your pen later, and it will automatically find the point in the recording in which you wrote those notes.
Justin: Yeah.
Diana: And it will just play it back for you. Isn’t that amazing?
Justin: It’s an amazing thing. It really is, it’s very cool.
Diana: So think about this, students, as you’re heading off to college.
Justin: Right.
Diana: This would be a great thing to have in lecture.
Justin: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s not all it does. It also supports apps capable of assisting in translations. You can write a word in English and then translate it to Spanish, hearing it pronounced verbally through the speaker on the pen.
Diana: That’s amazing!
Justin: Yeah, the possibilities are endless.
Diana: Yes, and there’s even more that it can do but, you know, we’re going to run out of time.
Justin: We are. And so, these are cool things, very cool things, and you can get more information if you call and talk to Donny or send us a question.
Diana: Donny’s a pro at it!
Justin: Send us a question at…
Diana: questions@askmpa.com
Justin: Until next time.
Diana: Take care.
Justin: Tech Table is brought to you by MPA of Bloomfield, Iowa, and God’s Country Radio. You can visit us online at AskMPA.com.
Diana: If you have questions or comments, please send them to questions@askmpa.com. That’s questions@askmpa.com.
Justin: And thanks for listening.
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