The future of... Sticky notes

>> Walk into any office and you'll see them. On phones, in books, covering monitors. Sticky notes. Or Post Its. They're as universal as paperclips and coffee cups. And in the future, they may be smart too.

>> Cheap and simple, sticky notes haven't changed much since they first hit stores in 1979. MIT media lab grad student inaudible hopes to change that with intelligent sticky notes, called quickies.

>>The problem with the sticky notes, the physical sticky notes, is that they can't connect to the digital world at the moment. What we are trying to do, to bridge this gap by developing quickies, so that you can use the interface of sticky note. While at the same time, you can use the features of the digital word.

>> Using existing digital pen hardware, notes are captured by a computer as they're written. Ink recognition technology translates scroll into text, the searchable. And thanks to AI, they're automatically entered in the right place on the computer. Phone numbers are put in address books, appointments added to calendars.

>>We presently have a very big database of people's habit of writing things. So we match whatever you are writing on a sticky note with that big database that we have.

>> The technology could even send reminders to your mobile phone as text messages. With RFI D-tags imbedded in a note, an RFI reader is placed around the home or office. Quickies become a sort of homing device. Mysteries advisory Patty Moss explains.

>> You can just write as some tags on a quickie. For example, this is Patty's book and then you stick that quickie in the book and you can later ask the system where that particular note is located.

>> Not just for the tech savvy. Quickies could help users get information without ever laying a finger on a keyboard. Ideal for people like mystery's mom who lives in India.

>> She doesn't know how to use computers. She doesn't want to learn. But at the same time, this interface can act as a nice interface, a paper interface to the digital world. She can just say what is Dr. Smith's address? And the system, a small printer automatically prints out for her so she can use sticky note as an input device and paper as an output device.

>>So when will quickies kick in?

>>Well I feel that we need to do a lot more testing to really make sure that people with much, with not much supervision, or initial instruction, know how to use these quickies.

>> Yet the research is already creating buzz.

>>3M, the maker of Post It Notes, have visited MIT to see quickies in action. inaudible Mystery tells us the company was excited by what they saw. But the researchers haven't made any decisions yet on how they want to market the technology.

>> But that's the ultimate goal.

>> Well definitely as researchers we always want to see our inventions make it into the real world.

>> The future of sticky notes. Turning your personal scribble into digital docs. For ZDNet, I'm inaudible.