Today’s NYT has a blurb on Livescribe, the new company founded by LeapFrog’s Jim Marggraff to turn the Anoto-based FLY Pentop Computer into a note-taking application for students. His application is basically Lisa Stifelman’s 1997 Audio Notebook system but without all the extraneous hardware that was necessary back then: take notes on paper while the pen records the lecture. Tap on the note later and the pen recites whatever it recorded just before you wrote it.
As the article notes, pen-based input has had a long and difficult life, but I’ve always thought that if anything will be the killer app that brings it into the mainstream, this would be it. If their implementation is good, they’ve got a chance of really making a big splash.