How the oldest interface in the book is redrawing the map of the networked world.
They're building something enormous at a research park outside of Lund, Sweden. Like any concept that eventually becomes the standard by which imagination is measured, it started out small and grew as its creators came to understand the scale of what they were making. Now it's half as big as the United States.
By dawn - which means midmorning in winter at this latitude - the bulldozers have already been roaring for hours, churning mountains out of the red, muddy soil, forcing drivers to improvise roads over the fresh muck. The chaos of construction is not unusual here. The wireless boom in Europe and Asia is bringing dozens of new office buildings to research parks like this one all over Scandinavia, from startups incubated as student projects, to established firms poised to surf the wave of personal-area-network devices that will wash ashore in the next couple of years. Even more ambitious, however, is the project taking shape in a cluttered second-floor office known as the monkey cage by the engineers and programmers who work there.
As Christer Fåhraeus tries to describe the magnitude of what he and his team are designing, his fingers dance with a pen across a sheet of paper. A compact, straw-haired, 35-year-old Swede, Fåhraeus gives off the aura of a tensely coiled spring. In Swedish or English, he speaks staccato, as if there were too many ideas backing up behind the frustratingly slow buffer of syntax. To relieve the pressure inside him, he sketches arrows, rectangles, and intersections that form the true arc of his thoughts. Words come secondarily to him, Fåhraeus tells me - his brain thinks in images. He holds up the paper.
"This is the most advanced digital input screen ever developed," he declares. "It has very high resolution, perfect contrast, and costs a fraction of a cent to produce. Any graphical interface can be printed on it, and you get years of full-time education, paid for by the government, to learn how to use it. It will not be beaten in our lifetime."
He puts the paper in my hands. "And I can give it to you, because I have hundreds more," he offers, gesturing toward a stack of blank paper on his desk. Fåhraeus isn't handing me a sketch of the input screen. The paper is the screen.
That's what they're building at Anoto, the company Fåhraeus launched a year and a half ago beside this muddy field near the southwestern tip of Sweden: a network that can transform millions of sheets of paper into a new front end for the Internet.
By the end of this year, Ericsson will bring to market a pudgy-looking ballpoint called the Chatpen. It will be the first of a new breed of writing instrument invented by Anoto that will allow you to send email and faxes directly on paper, with no personal computer or wireless tablet in sight. You'll be able to jot these messages down on business cards, legal pads, or company letterhead. To send a message, you'll simply check a box for "Send as email" or "Send as fax" that's printed in the corner of the paper. Marking other boxes will route your message to pagers or mobile phones. A single scribbled note will trigger a cascade of networked events: Jotting down a lunch date in your day planner could update your laptop and fire off an email to your assistant.
"There are three fundamental technologies for gathering, storing, and spreading information - voice, computer, and paper and pen," Fåhraeus declares, drawing three squares on the paper and methodically checking them off. "Now we make this one digital and wireless, like the others." By closing the gap between paper and the digital domain, Anoto is planning to put the convenience and speed of the Net behind an interface that was debugged thousands of years ago.
"If we succeed," he adds, "we will have more product coverage than any other company on earth."
If his network rolls out as scheduled, within a year you'll be able to make a check mark beside a magazine ad to receive information about a product, or even to buy it. Visualize ecommerce without the click-and-wait: Browsing through a printed catalog, you'll purchase items - software, a subwoofer, or a trip to Paris - by ticking them off with a pen. Circling your destination on a city map will display, on your PalmPilot or mobile phone, the quickest route from here to there, movie showtimes, or tonight's menu at the best bistros in the area.
To do these things, you'll need an instrument like the Chatpen that contains technology developed by Anoto. (By 2003, other Anoto-enabled pens, including Pilot rollerballs and a characteristically elegant offering from Montblanc, will be available.) You'll also need a supply of the special paper that Anoto has christened digital paper. It won't be hard to find, and it won't cost much more than standard copy stock. Unlike Xerox PARC's electronic paper or MIT/E Ink's Immedia, Anoto's technology employs real paper and commonly available inks. By the time Chatpens appear in office-supply shops and mail-order catalogs this fall, digital paper sporting the Anoto logo will be turning up everywhere. This global rollout will be branded with the most recognizable names in the office-products industry. You'll be able to buy digital Cambridge legal pads, digital At-A-Glance organizers, digital Financial Times diaries, and digital Franklin planners handsomely bound in leather. This winter, expect flurries of digital 3M Post-it Notes.
At Comdex 2000 last fall, the buzz was that some Swedish startup (or Japanese; the name of the company, which does sound vaguely Pacific Rim, is taken from the Latin annoto, meaning "I scribble") had developed a cool "smart pen." Anoto was one of two finalists for a Best of Show award, though interestingly, it lost to the Tablet PC, Microsoft's platform that supports handwriting. Bill Gates' keynote, extolling the virtues of handwritten input, included a demo in which he beamed a hand-drawn map to an assistant - with directions to the nearest Starbucks.
While the established heavyweight took home the prize, the concepts driving the Anoto network are a lot more ambitious than Microsoft's latest must-buy for the handheld sector. Pen-based interfaces are not exactly news, even if being able to write in your own handwriting is considerably easier than trying to recall the Graffiti symbol for the letter q. While the Chatpen demo in the Ericsson booth - featuring a caricaturist whose drawings were piped to a laptop screen - was cute, it barely hinted at Anoto's potential.
Anoto's approach, in contrast to Microsoft's, doesn't require a PC. Each Anoto pen contains a Bluetooth chip that communicates with any other Bluetooth device within 30 feet, which could be your mobile phone or PDA. Ericsson will introduce the R520, the first handset to ship with Bluetooth, in the US and Europe by the second half of this year. Nokia already sells a Bluetooth card for its 6210 phone, and Toshiba started shipping Bluetooth PC cards last fall. The penetration of these devices is expected to snowball as the cost of Bluetooth chipsets plummets to between $5 and $10 in the next three years. If the public-access Bluetooth nodes now in development at companies like Cerulic and NomadNetworks are widely installed in airports, hotels, and conference centers, eventually all you'll need to carry is an Anoto-enabled pen and a sheet of digital paper.
As nifty and convenient as the porting of handwritten text to the Net may seem, there will be even more advantages to liberation from the networked typewriter. If your native language is, say, Chinese, Arabic, or Russian, you will no longer have to translate your thoughts into an alphabet that a QWERTY keyboard understands. Once symbols and line drawings are as easy to pour into the datastream as ASCII, you won't have to depend on text at all. Storyboards, architectural sketches, fabric designs, game strategies, and comic strips will be emailed, faxed, or posted to the Web as quickly as they can be sketched by hand. Equations, with their special characters and sub- and superscripts, will be a breeze. If you compose a melody on sheet music, you will be able to play it instantly on your mobile phone or MIDI device. An artist will be able to zap sketches from his atelier to the Kinko's around the corner.
"Leonardo da Vinci would be our perfect customer," brags Jan Andersson, the president of Anoto.
The peerless doodler from Florence might have appreciated that the spark of genius which makes the network function does not reside in Anoto's fancy pens. It's printed on the paper.
It's a map.
The first time you see this map, you may not even notice it. Printed in a shade of carbon-based ink called Anoto Black that's more visible at the infrared end of the spectrum, the map appears as a light-gray dusting of dots, forming a nearly invisible grid on the surface of the paper. Each sheet of digital paper carries only a small portion of the map. If you look at an Anoto-enabled Post-it, what you're seeing is a Post-it-sized fraction of a map that is actually 1.8 million square miles - half the area of the US.
Here's how it works: Beside the ballpoint tip of each Anoto-enabled pen is a lens. Behind the lens is the same sort of CMOS image-sensing chip used in cash machines and digital cameras. This tiny, inexpensive eye is wired to a microprocessor in the pen. Every one-hundredth of a second, the camera takes a snapshot of whatever portion of the map is underneath the pen at any moment.
The pen doesn't actually "see" what you're writing. The CMOS chip is programmed to favor infrared, so the trail of ink is invisible to the camera. All the pen sees is the map. ("The ink is just there to make you feel comfortable," purrs a piece of Anoto documentation, with typical Swedish understatement.)
The dots that make up the map are each one-tenth of a millimeter in diameter, and they're arrayed on a grid of 2- by 2-millimeter squares, 36 dots to a square. In a basic grid square, these dots would be arranged smoothly along x/y axes, like perfectly aligned chess pieces. All of the points on the Anoto map, however, are slightly displaced from those axes. This displacement creates a unique pattern in each square - and there are 4,722,366,482,869,645,213,696 squares in all.
To visualize this, imagine that you're writing on a huge sheet of graph paper. The pattern of dots in any particular square corresponds to an exact location on the sheet - say, "B2." As you write on the paper, your pen travels over a series of locations: from B2, to B3, then over to C1 as you cross a t, and so forth. The movement of your pen over these locations corresponds exactly to the shape of what you're writing. Using the map, the pen obtains a precise reading of its position on the vast grid, down to one-thirtieth of a millimeter. As the instrument dances across the grid, it stores a series of locations. It time-stamps this itinerary, in case later verification is needed. There's enough memory in the pen to store about a hundred notebook-sized pages of writing.
Each instrument is coded with a unique identity. The pen in your pocket might be number 754348847, for example. When you check off one of the special function boxes - like "Send as fax" - in the corner of each piece of paper, the pen transmits the contents of its memory to Anoto-powered Bluetooth devices in your network. (In addition to the standard Bluetooth security layer, this information is also encrypted by the pen, using Public Key Infrastructure and 128-bit keys.) From one of those devices, such as a phone or PDA with a wireless modem, the burst of information from the pen hitches a ride to the Net.
It's important to make one thing clear: The Anoto pen does not understand language. With certain exceptions, the pen doesn't perform OCR (optical character recognition) on what you've written to translate your handwriting into standard ASCII text. The email messages you send out arrive in recipients' in-boxes as small inline graphics files displaying your words, in your handwriting, exactly the way you wrote it. (When you send email to a mobile phone, it appears as a graphical SMS message.)
Certain areas on the paper will be dedicated to OCR-related functions. Letters and numbers - email addresses and subject lines, snail mail addresses, and phone numbers - written carefully in form fields there will be converted to ASCII characters. A digital business card, for instance, might have lines on the back where you can enter contact information. Checking "Send" would email that information to the person whose name is on the front of the card.
The pen doesn't know if you've just scribbled a love note, signed a pink slip, or declared war. It knows only a few things: which pen it is in the Anoto network, which locations on the map it's been seeing lately, and what time it is. This information - the pen's identity and a series of time-stamped locations on the map - is what gets transmitted to the Net.
There, the encrypted stream of bits from the pen employs standard DNS protocols, like the ones used by a Web browser, to look for the Anoto Name Server, or ANS, which is a multimillion-dollar array of Unix drives currently under construction in Stockholm. The first ANS disk array will be located there, but eventually Anoto will employ a distributed network of servers. Each transmission from the pen arrives at the ANS with a question: "Who owns the part of the map where I am now?"
This is where things really get interesting. The big map is divided into territories, with a certain number of grid squares allocated for various products and services. One area of the map, say, might be reserved for Filofax organizers. Another will be dedicated to Post-it Notes. A third might belong to a software vendor who runs magazine ads printed on digital paper. By entering into a partnership with Anoto, you buy your own little chunk of real estate on the big map, which gives you the right to print that portion of the map on your products - whether your business is manufacturing legal pads, booking vacations on cruise ships, or selling DVDs from a catalog.
By tracking where each Anoto pen is on the map, the ANS knows, for instance, that pen number 754348847 made a check mark at 12:03 pm in an area of the grid that belongs to an online florist. The instrument then transmits a message to the florist's own servers to fulfill the purchase order, dispatching a dozen roses to the mailing address written at the bottom of the paper. Because OCR is dodgy business - as anyone who uses one of the fax-to-email services knows - the shipping address might appear on the sender's mobile phone for verification before the bouquet leaves the warehouse.
Anoto isn't in this game to make a branded splash in the paper business, or to steal market share from Bic. Ericsson's Chatpen will be used to establish the standard, and the business of designing later versions of the pen will fall to established players like Pilot and Montblanc. Anoto won't be making paper, either.
Anoto's business model resides in the ANS - in selling off chunks of the big map, and tracking every transaction scribbled on digital paper. If a purchase is made on Mead paper, with a Montblanc pen, and the product or service is delivered to the customer by an online merchant, then Mead, Montblanc, the merchant, and Anoto each get a cut. Anoto is betting that it will be able to tap into revenue streams created by a breed of paper-based ecommerce services that hasn't even been imagined yet.
Such streams, however, can only run in courses laid by a widely accepted standard. In that sense, Anoto is a thoroughly 21st-century business: It's not about making widgets and shipping them to the consumer, or about building a brand. It's about advocating a standard, and then insinuating a new enterprise into the global infrastructure created by that standard.
Anoto isn't locked into Bluetooth. If that technology confounds expectations and is not widely adopted, Anoto could swap the transceiver out of its pens for anything else that can do the job. However, the chip inside the pen gives the thousands of companies committed to Bluetooth - like Ericsson, which is keen on extending its market after facing unexpected losses early this year - an incentive to adopt Anoto's own standard for digital paper. Ericsson has picked up 15 percent of Anoto - a subsidiary of C Technologies, a publicly traded company that is another of Fåhraeus' ventures - with an option to pick up another 15 percent.
Whether or not Anoto and its partners are able to make every application come off smoothly - and more broadly, whether the entire project thrives or stumbles - the network concept offers a preview of the world to come. At one end of the digital spectrum, Moore's law and fat-pipe upgrades will deliver heart-stopping clock speeds and insane amounts of bandwidth in the next few years. But creative innovation is starting to flourish at the other end, too, where swarms of highly networked and practically disposable eyes and ears - like Anoto's pens - will be let loose on the world to swarm around us, listening and testing, and buzzing with the news of what they find.
A poet once told me that a writer must write with "the mind of God and the eyes of a spider." Before the Net came along, there was a lot of speculation that the ultimate product of technology, when we finally had the hardware to build it, would be something approximating the mind of God - a centralized superbrain. As we extend our networks into every available niche of our lives, the ultimate product of technology is turning out to be more like the sum of the sparks of intelligence in the eyes of billions of ephemeral spiders, weaving webs in all the corners of creation.
It's at this end of the spectrum that a startup like Anoto could blow everyone's mind by establishing a standard that is widely adopted, and scaling upward toward infinity.
With its labyrinth of cobblestone streets, Romanesque cathedral, and brooding medieval buildings housing bohemian cafés, Lund is the darkly enchanted European college town of your dreams. An extraordinary number of shops in Lund bear the sign Antikvariat, meaning "a seller of old books and antique maps." So it's only fitting that a new kind of map is being conceived not far from here. The town's fascination with cartography goes back at least as far as the 14th century, when a fantastically painted astronomical clock was installed in the Lund cathedral to track the sun and the moon through the zodiac, marking noon and 3 pm with a blast of trumpets and a procession of mechanical Wise Men toward the Virgin Mary. It still keeps good time.
The town, which is much closer to Copenhagen than it is to Stockholm, lies off the beaten path of the tourist trade, in part because many local merchants shutter their windows after the students leave for the summer. Swedes celebrate Lund for the climate of philosophical ferment surrounding the university, which is balanced by an attitude that Swedish essayist Jan Mårtensson called the Lund spirit: "an ironic distance to everything [and] a barb to deflate pompous self-importance."
In 1983, faced with a decline in Sweden's traditional industrial mainstays - shipbuilding and textile manufacturing - the town broke ground for the first science park in Sweden: Ideon, where Anoto is located. Ideon's first tenant was the Ericsson Mobile Telephony Laboratory. The cross-fertilization of academic research and commercial development - inspired by US models - proved fruitful. Ericsson's first portable mobile phone, the C900, was designed at Ideon and brought to market in 1987.
Fåhraeus grew up in Linköping and came to Lund as an undergraduate in 1986. His interests roamed broadly among the sciences, encompassing medical biophysics, bioengineering, and the mathematical modeling of neurons. As a teenager, he displayed a knack for making things happen. When he was 15, he launched the local chapter of a conservative student organization (the second largest in the country) and founded a reading circle that received funds from the government. Though Fåhraeus currently holds 7 patents and has filed applications for 50 more, he says, "I never thought of myself as an inventor. I never thought of myself as an entrepreneur. But I was good at taking initiative, inventing games - or reinventing them if I was losing."
In December 1994, Fåhraeus launched his first company, CellaVision, which specializes in building microscopy systems that partially automate cell analysis. It wasn't easy. In the early '90s, the chill winds of a global recession, stirred up by currency speculation, blew over the Swedish krona. The Swedish National Bank boosted its lending rate fivefold, while executives from companies like Volvo floated down on golden parachutes to countries with lower tax burdens, such as the United Kingdom.
Just as the telecom revolution was getting under way, young Swedish entrepreneurs scrabbled for sources of venture capital. Fåhraeus persisted. In June of 1996, he founded C Technologies, which produced his most successful product to date, a handheld scanner called the C Pen. (Despite its name, the C Pen, which saw a modest $5 million in sales last year, is not primarily a writing instrument.) Other products created at C Tech include intelligent surveillance cameras (spun off to form a company called WeSpot) and an optical mouse. A year after starting C Tech, Fåhraeus launched Precise Biometrics, which specializes in fingerprint recognition.
The common thread running through Fåhraeus' product line is real-time image processing. What the optical mouse, scanner, and Anoto pen have in common is that they take digital snapshots of what they see to determine their whereabouts. The camera in an optical mouse (such as the Apple Pro Mouse) scrutinizes irregularities on the scrolling surface to gauge what is called the mouse's relative position. The mouse judges movement, not location. If you pick up the mouse and set it down, it forgets where it was and starts tracking from zero again.
The C Pen does let you add your own words to scanned text by tracing letters on any irregular surface, like a page in a book. But because the C Pen contains no ink, you don't see the letters you're writing. They're preserved in the scanner's memory, and you can edit or transmit them like regular scanned text. As with an optical mouse, however, lifting the C Pen from its tracking surface cancels out its relative position. To write an x, you have to use what's called a unistroke - you must cross a single line over itself without lifting the pen, as you do with a palmtop stylus.
Understandably, this annoyed Petter Ericson, a graduate student at Lund University who began working for C Tech in March 1997. In a country of reserved, fair-skinned blonds, Ericson has the swarthy good looks of an Italian bad-boy film star. Fåhraeus also hired Ericson's high school friend, Ola Hugosson. While Ericson's vitality seems barely contained under a thicket of cowlicks, Hugosson is clearly focused inward. A musician from a family of musicians, Hugosson plays Bach at home on the piano. He met Ericson when they both enrolled in a national contest for student programmers. Hugosson was impressed by the lightning rapidity of Ericson's mind, while Ericson was awed by Hugosson's intensity as he bore down on a problem. They made a powerful team. Ericson then encouraged another old friend, Linus Wiebe, to take a job at Precise Biometrics.
All three first learned how to program in the hacker subculture that sprang up around an illustrious generation of home computers whose names are legendary among programmers of a certain age: the Apple II, the Commodore 64, the Atari 800, the Amiga 1000, and the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. There was a narrow window where 13-year-old geeks-in-training could sharpen their chops - and make friends all over the world - by writing algorithms and hacking serious code. Before that, computers were too expensive. After the introduction of so-called user-friendly interfaces from Apple and IBM, the good stuff was all hidden under the hood.
Ericson and Hugosson brought the old hacker brio with them to C Tech, where they were paid to explore answers to essential questions, and even write their own operating system. "I used to think, 'Later in our careers, no one will ever let us do this,'" Ericson recalls. By fall 1997, there was a stew of applications for real-time image processing simmering there. One of Fåhraeus' brainstorms involved printing a pattern on a mousepad that a mouse could then read like a map. It would judge its position absolutely, without reference to any prior location.
One day in February 1999, after C Tech team members had been mulling over concepts like this for months, Ericson decided to go home to nearby Malmö and take a bath.
Like any good citizen in a region of the planet where baking in a cedar-planked room is considered the acme of relaxation, Ericson jumped into the tub to clear his mind. "A lot of this work is trying to solve a problem while you're continuously interrupted by ringing phones and ICQs. Your mind becomes like a bad Windows system running too many background processes," he told me geekishly. He's convinced that hot baths, like saunas, elevate the temperature of the brain, increasing the flow of uncensored creative thinking.
What came to him in the tub was dots.
Coincidentally, one of the first methods ever proposed for marrying the ease of writing by hand to the data-crunching velocity of computers also employed dots. In the '50s, Bell System switchboard operators kept records of the long distance calls they handled on 2½- by 5-inch scraps of paper called toll tickets. Operators were scribbling 2 billion tickets a year, but paying keypunch operators to transfer a year's worth of call records to punch cards would have cost Bell $32 million. At the Eastern Joint Computer Conference in 1957, T. L. Dimond of Bell Labs outlined a method for capturing handwritten data directly. He proposed replacing the tickets with a plastic tablet energized by a flow of current through the writing stylus. To standardize the shapes of the handwritten characters so that a computer could read them, Dimond suggested training the operators to construct letters and numbers around pairs of dots, a method he called "dot constraint." Dimond named his device the Stylator.
Most of the pen-based input devices available today use variations on Dimond's strategy of embedding processing power in the writing surface. Wacom tablets run magnetic pulses through a grid of embedded wires to get a fix on the cursor's position. Many digital whiteboards employ ultrasonic triangulation to do the same thing. Palmtops, of course, allow users to write on the computer itself.
This was Ericson's flash in the bathtub: A complex pattern of dots would make an excellent map for absolute positioning. Dots are good "primaries" for low-overhead image processing, because they look the same no matter which way you rotate them. Even if the organization of the dots is random, the device could consult a lookup table to determine which location in the pattern it is seeing, and thus determine its position. Using such a table, however, squandered processing time and memory. "This problem," Ericson concluded, "has Ola written all over it."
After Ericson told Hugosson about his idea one Friday afternoon, Hugosson was, indeed, all over the problem. With the many constraints posed by a system that has to run super-efficiently on a handheld device, it was a perfect puzzle for a mathematician who could appreciate the beauty that Bach coaxed out of rigorous symmetries. When Ericson returned to his desk on Monday morning, he found a sheet of paper, with a pattern printed on it, waiting for him.
Hugosson had spent the entire weekend pounding out the math, incubating clouds of dots in C and PostScript. His solution was to generate the pattern by using an algorithm, rather than depending on brute processing power to sort through random messes of dots. That way, the mouse wouldn't have to store the entire pattern in its memory. It could merely store the algorithm.
The pattern he presented to Ericson consisted of dots in two sizes, spaced a millimeter apart. With the number of possible permutations of small and large dots, the size of Hugosson's map was 4 by 4 meters. This seemed like more than enough area to play with, because the men were thinking only in terms of a device that would track across a mousepad or a book.
Then Tomas Edso and Mats-Petter Petterson, two student interns at C Tech, suggested using dot displacement, rather than dot size, to determine the unique pattern of locations on the grid. Each dot would then yield two bits of information, corresponding to the degree of displacement along the x and y axes, rather than one. Edso and Petterson's strategy - which employed smaller dots, with 36 per square instead of 25 - resulted in 272 possible arrangements of dots, rather than 225. Even printing the dots only .3 millimeters apart - rather than 1 millimeter - and allowing for redundancy to correct for scanning errors, the size of the grid became much larger. "How big is the pattern today ?" members of the C Tech team would tease one another.
From an area that would have covered 10 letter-sized sheets of paper, and then several football fields, the pattern eventually grew as big as Belgium, and finally to its current dimensions: the equivalent of 73,000,000,000 letter-sized sheets, or the area from the Pacific Ocean to the Mississippi, and from the Rio Grande to the Canadian border.
Clearly, there was a lot of there there. But what to do with it?
One day in the lab, Ericson smashed open a Bic pen, extracted the tip and ink supply, and taped it to a C Pen. Suddenly the "interface" was no longer the device itself, but any surface that you could print the pattern on.
"We realized we were sitting on something fundamental," Fåhraeus told me. "We were on a clean sheet of paper."
It was Fåhraeus who had the bold notion of seeing that virtual territory as marketable real estate in an enormous network of partnerships. For the last six months, Örjan Johansson, chair of the Anoto board, has been pounding the pavement, negotiating partnerships with 3M, Mead, Ashford, At-A-Glance, Charles Letts, Time Manager International, Filofax, and Time/System International in the US, as well as Esselte, Unipapel, and Hermelin in Europe and Kokuyo in Japan - each market leaders in their region. These companies have everything to gain: The technical demands and costs of printing the Anoto pattern on their products are trivial. (You can do it with any printing system that has 1,000 dpi resolution, and Anoto is developing plug-ins for Quark and PageMaker as part of its developer's kit, which should be available by the time you read this.)
"When you tell these companies that they can go from manufacturing plain paper to becoming a service provider with paper as the portal, they realize they're in a whole new ball game," Johansson told me. By convincing the largest manufacturers in every paper market to print its dots on their products, Anoto is establishing a de facto global standard before consumers have even heard of the company.
At Ideon, Fåhraeus sketched out Anoto's three-year plan for world domination. First: License the pattern and pen technology to Anoto's initial partners for a song - in some cases for free - to establish and disseminate the standard. Then, in year one, sign partnerships with mobile phone companies and telcos, who see the technology as a way to siphon a flood of ecommerce sales through their own billing channels. A Chatpen would be a natural accessory to sell, or give, to the owner of a Bluetooth phone; the company that bills for the phone service could then take a slice of every scribbled transaction. Sonera, the second-largest telecom provider in Scandinavia, signed on in February, and announcements of other major providers are expected at this year's CeBIT. When you sign up for Sonera's mobile service, you'll be offered the option to subscribe to Anoto's paper-based services.
Year two: Market the technology in consumer-electronics stores, branded with names now associated with personal computers. Year three: Imagine racks of Anoto-enabled Parker pens for sale at Office Depot, beside shelves of digital paper.
In January 2000, Linus Wiebe left Precise Biometrics to join Anoto as director of new concepts. Now his job is to weigh the business potential of applications such as putting the Anoto map on standardized tests, creating real-time lotto games, transmitting prescriptions directly to pharmacies, printing active hyperlinks in books, and even laying the pattern over the floors of warehouses so that forklifts can be steered remotely.
As descriptions of Anoto's technology have started to spread around the world, the proposals that land daily in Wiebe's in-box reach farther and farther afield. One email he received from a university proposed printing the pattern on a curved semi-transparent plastic surface and embedding the optics, processor, and Bluetooth transceiver into a 2- by 2-centimeter cube. "I still do not know the problem they were trying to address," Wiebe observes dryly.
For Hugosson, this flood of potential applications for his algorithm is immensely gratifying. "When you can invent an idea that is so basic that it leads to other ideas," he says, "an idea that seems to have many implications, an idea that leads to a completely new set of thinking ..."
He's quiet for a moment. "I don't know how to express it in words," he concludes.
Why would a posse of hotshot Swedish coders - or more to the point, a struggling telecom giant like Ericsson - hitch their wireless wagons to a fading star? Everyone knows the paper industry must have been hit hard by the overnight ubiquity of the PalmPilot and the Handspring Visor. And surely, with Bluetooth - or a couple of years out, with 3G - the 2,000-year-long Age of Paper will soon be over.
So whatever happened to the paperless office? There's actually more paper in the digital office - cascading out of printers and clogging up copy machines - than there was 10 years ago (30 percent more, according to a report by the American Forest and Paper Association). Like the paperback novel that was supposed to be supplanted by every technical marvel from the radio to the ebook, paper solves more problems than it creates. We don't hate paper - the way we hate insipid broadcast TV, tangled telephone cords, futzing with Wite-Out, five-day waits for a letter from across town, and stores that are open only at certain times of day. It's the inert state of the data stored on paper that is a vexing anachronism, and this is precisely the problem that Anoto addresses.
Palmtops are indeed eating into the market for a specific kind of product: the kind of paper - in day planners, calendars, and little black books - that stores data that wants to communicate with our digital networks. Executives for Mead and Franklin Covey carefully acknowledge that there's been "a flattening" of the market in the last two years, specifically for formats that handle contact lists and appointment schedules.
The repeat business in this sector is still the envy of other industries. Many of the 50 million customers who buy a couple of At-A-Glance calendars every year, to say nothing of the estimated 800 million who buy diaries, will part with their tattered paper products only when they're pried from their cold, dead, pulp-loving fingers. Those buyers are so fanatically loyal to specific model numbers and form factors that John Hayek, a senior VP of marketing for Mead, calls it a "religious" market. Anoto will furnish a way for people to link their beloved paper to the flow of digitized information. For Mead, Hayek says, betting on Anoto is "an acknowledgement that a paper-based organization is looking forward in the 21st century."
One area of the office market that is exploding, rather than flattening, is in products that make it easier to "co-use" PDAs and paper-based media. For the past few years, the companies Anoto is courting have been struggling to find their footing in a changing landscape where critical information is segregated on both sides of the paper-versus-digital divide. "Right now, we're all trying to synchronize Palms, phones, Outlook, day planners, Web sites, and thousands of floating Post-it Notes," says Jeff Anderson, VP of Franklin Covey's Eproducts and Planner division. "It's almost seamless now, but the big glaring gap is paper-back-to-digital. Anoto is the last leg to the full solution."
Despite all the clicking on the Web, there are many areas of the paper domain where digital has barely made a dent. The annual cost of processing forms that are filled in by hand, such as tax returns, is still $700 billion in the US alone. There are innumerable applications in which digital input could migrate happily to paper: imagine putting a check mark in the newspaper to program your VCR. Anoto pens themselves will be customized by users who check off options in manuals, the interface fine-tuned by - what else? - ticking boxes on paper. If you want to customize the color of the ink or the texture of a line in an email message, for instance, you'll choose from a list of options on a printed menu. Or you could create a virtual flip book by sketching a series of drawings and selecting a box labeled "Send as GIF animation."
"From a paper-product manufacturer's perspective," says Hayek, "we're talking about a little more ink for the dots. It's an easy do."
Like the other startups rising out of the mud at Ideon, Anoto represents not only a new generation of aggressively innovative Swedish IT ventures, but a new generation of Swedes.
At a restaurant with a sweeping view of Stockholm's Old City, I washed down eight kinds of herring with five flavors of akavit with Per Bill, a member of parliament who championed many of the changes in policy that have made his country a leader in the emerging wireless landscape. He articulated the changes in the Swedish psyche wrought by the economic upheavals of the last decade.
"In California, it's fun to be rich, and it's also OK to go bankrupt. In Japan, if you fail, you're supposed to commit seppuku," he said. "Ten years ago in Sweden, you were not allowed to be rich, and you were also not allowed to fail."
Bill used a virtually untranslatable word as the key to understanding the avoidance of both conspicuous success and humiliating failure that is deeply ingrained in the Swedish psyche: lagom. Meaning something like "lukewarm" and "just enough," lagom is the inclination among Swedes to shun ostentation, accept modest rewards, be good team players, and fly under the radar. In the past, the positive side of lagom caused Swedes to refuse to allow the kind of desperate poverty in their ranks that is business as usual in the US. The negative side could be seen in the tendency for the Swedish government to expend energy twiddling with the economy from the top down, rather than seeding it from the ground up by providing incentives for entrepreneurs.
What shook up the lagom mindset, he explained, was the recession. Before 1994, Swedes thought that 4 percent unemployment was a catastrophe; within a year or two, more than one in ten Swedes found themselves out of work. A precipitous change in economic status became less of a cause for loss of face. To compete in the global IT marketplace, Bill observed, "you have to embrace the possibility of failure."
Startups like Anoto are training grounds for a generation of Swedes who grew up watching Dallas and Falcon Crest, becoming early adopters of technology, and absorbing American notions of ambition. Now that they're launching their own companies, says Lars-Fredric Hansson of Ernst & Young ePartners, they've been getting assistance from an unexpected source. The managers who made golden-parachute exits to countries with lighter tax burdens when the recession hit are coming home to Sweden to invest in the next generation of IT entrepreneurs.
There's a fitting symbol of this convergence of old and new economies outside the Ericsson headquarters at Ideon: a stone monument to Harald Bluetooth, who was the king of Denmark in the 10th century. In one hand, he holds a phone, and in the other, a laptop. The significance of the name Bluetooth for the group that developed the wireless standard originates with the king, who threw parties for his fiercest rivals. These wild affairs would "help clear out the bad feeling," said board chair Johansson, who came to Anoto after spearheading the Bluetooth initiative at Ericsson. Many members of the original Bluetooth coalition had long been cutthroat competitors: Ericsson and Nokia; IBM and Toshiba; the US versus Japan.
"My aunt used to hold out her closed fist and say, 'How much can you get in this hand? It's much easier to get something in this hand,'" Johansson explained, relaxing his fist. In this way, the monument stands as a symbol of the positive side of lagom - knowing when to lay aside your arms, even in the presence of your rivals, to achieve a common goal.
That's why Johansson wasn't particularly disappointed that Anoto lost to Microsoft at Comdex. When the Anoto team saw the Tablet PC, he says, they immediately began thinking of ways to build bridges between the two technologies. "Maybe they're creating the back end, and we're creating the front end. Writing on glass - how fun is that?"
Not as much fun, Anoto is betting, as making it possible for the mind of the Net to reach as close as the page of the magazine you're reading right now.
"The paper companies have been feeling that the digital train had passed them by," Wiebe told me in a Stockholm coffee shop. "We're throwing out a hook, saying, 'C'mon, join us. Paper has been right all along. We're bringing you with us.'"
