(2006-06-01) Mace Info Pad

Michael Mace makes the case for development of an Info Pad - a Mobile device bigger than a Smart Phone but smaller than a Lap Top. He's targeting what he defines as an Information Lover Market Segment. The third group is professionals who are more introverted, people who deal a lot with information rather than communications. The information could be documents, it could be databases, it could even be artwork. But the emphasis is on the individual's interaction with that information (Thinking Space). Think doctors, artists, educators, and researchers. The ideal mobile device for these people is...well, it doesn't exist. Rather different than a NetBook. (Update: he's talking about a 7" Tablet.)

You write on the screen and it captures your notes and drawings. It's as much like writing on a pad of paper as possible, because the thing you're replacing is the paper notepad or journal (NoteBook) that students and knowledge workers carry with them all the time.

He considers Sketching/handwriting to be a key requirement: no HandWriting conversion (which needs to be ~100% accurate for acceptance), but recognition for the sake of indexing for recall (LifeStreams, MsOneNote). This mimics the way people remember things, through associations. You'll remember that the meeting was at a particular conference, or that someone specific was in the room, or that it was the same month as your trip to Mexico. With notes that are cross-referenced with your calendar and contacts, you can browse just the ones that you took at that time, or with that person, or in that location. You may have to look through a few pages, but we should be able to narrow the search enough that it'll be pretty easy to find what you need... The killer app in an info pad isn't the note-taking, it's the lookup and indexing functions.

• I'm not sure I see HandWriting as crucial to that, though being able to place blocks of text anywhere around the Sketch is crucial.
• For the Meeting scenario, I wonder whether a process change of using Techno Graphy is more important than lots of individual Note Taking going on. (You'll still have some of that, but much less.)

One thing I'd do is carry an archive of all my EMail-s. Every e-mail I've ever sent. Incoming and outgoing, personal and business. Not the enclosures (they're too large), but the text. It would be great to be able to also capture snapshots of Web articles that I want to refer back to in the future (Personal Web Archive).

He sees a follow-on use to be creation of an EBook EcoSystem equivalent to ITunes. People will buy it to take notes and archive documents (Compelling), but the hardware I've described above is also ideal for reading ebooks... In the long term, the content store becomes the core of our business.

Feb'2011: reviewing some options. What I want -- what's required to kick off the info pad revolution -- is a product in the middle on both price and features, optimized just for managing information.