This UCSC Grad Helped Build the World's Smartest Pen

For his next trick, says Robbie Suk, 28, jokingly, he's going to try world domination.

It's hard not to share his exhuberance. He graduated from UCSC in 2007 and immediately got his first job with an Oakland-based company that has changed the world, at least for anyone who writes and needs to remember exact words or images.

He's an engineer working on the Livescribe Smartpen, a product that is almost as revolutionary now as the iPod was in its day. The pen not only records audio but it saves every word you write and every picture you draw on a page and puts them into your computer.

The pen debuted in 2009, in time for Suk to use it in a post-doctorate class, in which he says he learned more and got a better grade than before the pen.

"It changed the way I took notes. I would write very briefly and focus on what the professor was saying. I knew my pen was taking care of getting it all down, so I could review it later."

The company is on the verge of selling 1 million of the devices, which are as much a micro computer as an old fashioned writing instrument, according to marketer Jody Farrar.

"We have created a whole new category," she adds. "There really was nothing like this before. There were tablets and laptops, but no computer in a pen."

The pens are sold in retail outlets including Best Buy, Brookstone and the Apple Store and online at Amazon and Livescribe.com. The pens sell from between $99 and $179, ranging from 2-8 gigabytes of memory. It will store between 45 and 115 hours of talking with 2 gigs, depending on the audio quality and 390-980 on the 8 gig.

It will also record in higher quality stereo and can be used with an outboard microphone for concerts.

Mary Jo Aloi, a homeopathic medical practitioner with offices in Capitola and Los Gatos says the pen has become instrumental in her practice.

"In my business I need not to just get down the details, but the way they say it, what kind of language they used and the way they expressed themselves," she says. "I take good notes, but for me to go back and hear the way they say things is really helpful."

She lets patients know they are being taped and a few object, but overall, most are more comfortable with the smartpen.

"I could have a computer in the consultation room, but I don't like that. Asking people questions and developing a rapport where people are going to open up, having a computer between them and me doesn't feel good."

As a journalist and college instructor, it has changed my life.

When I do an interview, go to a city council meeting or listen to a speech, I no longer have to worry whether I'm writing fast enough to capture every word. I can jot down the beginning of a sentence and then later, when I review the notes, I tap the pen on the special paper you have to use with the pen and it plays back the whole sentence.

It makes it possible to always quote people exactly, which as any journalist can tell you, is one of the most important parts of the job. And rather than having to spend hours after an interview transcribing tapes, this lets me find exactly what I need quickly.

The company was started by Jim Marggraff, a serial entrepreneur from Boston, who worked at LeapFrog Enterprises, which made pads and pens for the children's market. Livescribe is geared to older students and professionals.

In 2010 Livescribe took the smartpens to a new level, opening them up to apps that produced creative visions, not unlike the iPhone. With one app you can write a word in Spanish and the pen will translate it to English and visa versa.

With another, you can draw a piano or guitar and press the pen to the pad and it will play the strings or keys as notes. Not just any notes, but the exact scales in the right places, as if you were playing a real instrument.

Suk studied computer engineering at UCSC and worked in a performance car shop in Palo Alto for fun. In one of those only-in-Silicon Valley-stories- one of the Porsche mechanics, a Rennaissance man named Mark Thomas, ended up at Livescribe and hired Suk.

He started in quality control before the pen came out and spent his days working with it, figuring out how to improve the software features. Before long, he moved into hardware as the company launched a new line of pens called the Echo.

"We all eat our own dog food," says Suk, explaining that the developers use the pens constantly to see what purchasers would want and need from it.

"We are reimagining the way people communicate with the written and spoken word," he adds. "I'd like to see people using it the way they use their smart phone now. If you use it in class, it's not distracting the way a laptop is."

Arianna Huffington, president and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post Media Group (which Patch is a part of), is also a smartpen fan. She says she has long used blue pens for editing and keeps boxes around.

"But last year at the Aspen Ideas Festival I saw the Livescribe Smartpen for the first time, and I was captivated enough to buy one -- and, yes, tweet about it.

"It's one of those innovations that puts me in mind of the brilliant, entrepreneurial minds among us -- one day I'd never heard of it, and the next day I couldn't live without it. For the next version, I hope they make an even smarter one that will tell me to turn it off and go to sleep."