Now, Magic Pens transfer handwritten notes

Shyamala Seetharamanan, Chennai
Financial Chronicle
Speech Bridge Technology (SBT) and South Africa-based Xcallibre have tied up to launch the world’s first digital pen technology called the Magic Pen in India. The device, which closely resembles a pen, has the ability to transfer handwritten notes from paper forms directly to back-office databases. The technology enables digitisation of the form-filling process in businesses with several customer touch points such as banks.

Xcallibre pens are used like ordinary pens — only that they are embedded with electronics capable of storing and transmitting data. The forms can be printed on any laser printer and the data capture elements can be customised to suit an individual organisation’s needs. The pen has an infrared camera and processor. While users write on the specially designed forms, the strokes are read and the data is directly transferred to the database through wireless technology.

“According to our internal research, the whole manual form filling cycle takes between three and five days. This technology completes the process in 20 seconds and in poorest network conditions, it takes three minutes,” said Willy Govendar, chief executive officer of the SDH group, South Africa.

Xcallibre, an SDH’s group company, has about 35 customers in South Africa, including DHL, Deloitte and the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation, he added.

Companies such as Logitech manufacture such pens and they cost about €250 a unit.

However, Xcallibre offers the technology on a pay-per-use model and the overall expenditure is about 40 percent less compared with the manual process, said A Chandrasekaran, director of SBT. The pens are tamper-proof and can be blocked if stolen, Govendar said. Without the digital papers, the pens become irrelevant because the back-end server will identify which data comes from what form. The technology has applications in sectors including telecom, banking, insurance and education, he added.