Some habits are hard to kick. Even though the world is trending towards a digital lifestyle, many business users still use Post-it Notes. I am guilty of using these low-tech pieces of paper daily. Sometimes, I need to quickly jot-down a note or phone number; a piece of paper can be faster than unlocking my smartphone or workstation. However, at the end of the day, I find my desk littered with these things. I have often wished for an easy way to transfer them to my computer.
Apparently, I am not alone as today, Evernote announces a partnership with Post-it which aims at organizing these notes. The company says, "for us at Evernote, Post-it Notes are a Hero Product. We strive for the sort of flexible, instantly-understandable usefulness that draws hundreds of millions of people to purchase Post-it brand products. There is one drawback. As ubiquitous as they are, they’re also, well, attached to stuff. That’s where Evernote comes in. Evernote is giving Post-it Notes a digital life and whole new set of tricks".
The company further says, "our latest update to Evernote for iPhone and iPad introduces the new Post-it Note camera. What it does looks simple, but is actually powered by a bunch of engineering magic. The camera lets you take multiple photos of Post-it Notes in a single session. Evernote then recognizes the color, extracts the handwriting, enhances it and finally places it onto a digital representation of the paper inside a note. What you’ll see inside of Evernote are beautiful Post-it Notes that are saved, easy to find and accessible from anywhere".
In other words, these are not just pictures of a Post-it Note -- your hand-writing will be converted to digital text using the iPhone, iPad or iPod touch camera with Optical character recognition. This will save users a lot of time by preventing unnecessary transcribing. However, a user may want to test the feature before they entirely trust it. After all, if the software misreads a single digit of a phone number and you throw away the original, you may lose contact with an important customer, business contact or pretty-lady that you want to have lunch with!
Also, the company has come up with an ingenious way to actually organize the pieces of paper based on color. Anal-retentive and OCD business users can now purchase different colored Post-it Notes that can correspond to different thoughts or subjects. This is a great way to stay organized.
Sadly, the company has not announced plans to bring this exciting technology to Android. This is very curious as Android's market-share for Q2 2013 is 79%, while iOS is only at 14%.