The Future Of...Sticky Notes

Music Sumi Das: Walk in to any office and you'll see them, on phones in books, covering monitors. Sticky notes or Post-its, they are as universal as paperclips and coffee cups and in the future they maybe smart too.

Music Sumi Das: Cheap and simple, sticky notes haven't changed much since they first hit stores in 1979. MIT Media Lab grad student Pranav Mistry hopes to change that with intelligent sticky notes called Quickies. Pranav Mistry: The problem with the sticky notes, the physical sticky notes is that they can't connect to a digital world at the moment. What we are trying to do to bridge this gap by developing Quickies so that you can use the intuitive interface of sticky note, but the same time you can use the features of the digital world. Sumi Das: Using existing digital pen hardware notes are captured by a computer as they are written. Ink recognition technology translates scroll into text that's searchable. And thanks to AI they are automatically entered in the right place on the computer. Phone numbers are put in address books, appointments added to calendars. Pranav Mistry: We basically have a very big data base of people's habit of writing things. So, we match whatever you are writing on a sticky note with that big data base with that we have. Sumi Das: The technology could even send reminders to your mobile phone as text messages. With RFID tags embedded in a note and RFID readers placed around the home or office, Quickies become a sort of homing device. Mistry's adviser Pattie Maes explains. Pattie Maes: So, you can just write some tags on a Quickie. For example, this is Pattie's book and then you stick that Quickie in the book and you can then later ask the system where that particular note is located. Sumi Das: Not just for the text savvy, Quickies could help users get information without ever laying a finger on a keyboard, ideal for people like Mistry's mom who lives in India. Pranav Mistry: She doesn't know how to use computers. She doesn't want to learn. By the same this interface can act as a nice interface or the paper interface to the digital world. She can just say, what is Dr. Smith's address and the system, a small printer automatically prints out for her. So, she again use sticky as an input device and paper as an output device. Sumi Das: So, when will a Quickies kick in? Pattie Maes: I feel that we need to do a lot more testing to really make sure that people with much, with not much supervision or initial instruction know how to use these Quickies. Sumi Das: Yet the research is already creating buzz. 3M the maker of Post-it notes have visited MIT to see Quickies in action. Pranav Mistry tells us the company was excited by what they saw, but the researchers haven't made any decisions yet on how they want to market the technology. But that's the ultimate goal. Pattie Maes: Definitely as researchers we always want to see our inventions make it into the real world. Sumi Das: The future of sticky notes, turning your personal scribble into digital docs. For BNET I'm Sumi Das.

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==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Techologies ====