HARDWARE
Using eBeam feels like sleight of hand. You show everyone a normal whiteboard, but as you start writing on it, every mark you make also appears on a nearby monitor. The meeting continues. You add notes in different colors, you erase, others write - and it all shows up onscreen, in color, written by an invisible hand. To conclude the electric writing demonstration, you tap a spot on the corner of the board, and a nearby printer produces the notes.
Such practical magic eliminates the chore of whiteboard-copying. But the eBeam meeting and teleconferencing software lets you do more than just take notes: You can revisit and play back previous sessions, take snapshots of multiple screens before you erase, and save entire meetings in various formats. You can archive your startup's first board meeting for posterity, or retrieve those storyboard sketches born of the creatives at JWT and too much Sumatra blend. Not only that, eBeam lets you annotate, highlight, and rearrange onscreen notes during the meeting or afterward - giving you the chance to revise history in the most flattering way.
In addition, eBeam allows you to host whiteboard meetings remotely, via the network. Other PCs running eBeam software can log in to your session, password protected, and highlight or annotate along with you. Machines without eBeam can see the session through any Java-enabled browser - but they can only look, not touch. While rival whiteboard systems, such as Virtual Ink's mimio, must be coupled with Microsoft NetMeeting for this remote conferencing capability, eBeam does it all by itself.
Setting up eBeam is easy: Install the software on your PC, stick two suction-cupped pods to the face of the whiteboard, then plug in to an electrical outlet and your serial port. The fun comes when you slip the dry-erase markers into special sleeves, launch the app, and write. As the marker moves across the whiteboard, four tiny transmitters at the tip of the battery-powered sleeve send infrared data to the pods, which determine the marker's position like a micro version of a GPS tracker. The pods pick up signals near the board's surface as well as on it; by unhinging the sleeve and pressing a spring-loaded button on the back of the marker, you can hold it a fraction of an inch above the board and write words onscreen - a great way to get your ideas off the drawing board.
eBeam: $599.95. Electronics for Imaging: +1 (650) 357 3500, www.efi.com.
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