SOFTWARE
i-Recall updates humankind's age-old ability to take notes. Thanks to Souvenir, a nifty application for syncing your scrawls with video- and audiotaped conferences and presentations, you can link from your text notes to any point within a video clip, an MP3, or any other multimedia moment.
Souvenir's kernel matches a video or audio clip to real-time note-taking. The setup works because every Souvenir-compatible digital device - notebook computer, Palm, and IBM Crosspad - has an internal clock. Simply upload your scribbles, and Souvenir does the rest. The software parses notes into distinct objects and links them to event timepoints in your media presentation. If the event was streamed on the Web, you can share your annotated presentation and notes with others. To publish them online, the well-designed software interface for the PC lets users organize and combine bits and pieces of an audio or video clip quickly.
I tried Souvenir with both a Palm V and an IBM Crosspad. For the Palm, i-Recall has built a "digital ink" program that translates handwriting into text, so you don't have to be a Graffiti savant to use it. The Crosspad lets you write on a regular legal pad; your notes are picked up by the Crosspad's sensors and appear in digital format on the PC. Surprisingly, the entire process - writing, uploading, synchronizing with the media, and then publishing on the Net - was practically seamless. The only difficulty I encountered had to do with the way media content is managed on the Web. Sites often publish video clips through a convoluted channel of CGI scripts, so it can be difficult to actually locate the clip's bare-bones URL to feed to Souvenir.
i-Recall, which attracted investment from such industry luminaries as Jay Chiat, spent much of its first year ironing out software bugs. The next hurdle is making Souvenir the standard for managing rich media on the Web. Sounds good to me. When a company executive edited The Third Man into sections with a few scribbles on a Palm, and then sent me the clip from about halfway through where Orson Welles makes his first appearance in the film, the postmodernist in me was gleeful.
Souvenir separated art from its context without scruple. Sample some noir, anyone?
Souvenir: free. i-Recall: www.i-recall.com.
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