The humble whiteboard is about to be integrated with the personal computer thanks to a few bits of plastic, a couple of simple circuits and some smart software.
The product, the Mimio "digital meeting assistant," from Boston start-up Virtual Ink, will be launched worldwide next month.
The company expects tosell the units for about $US499 ($940).
Asia Pacific operations manager Jaemes Shanley, in New Zealand to arrange distributors and show the product, says the company already has orders for 10,000 units in the United States.
"We are tapping into existing, well-established behaviour of using the whiteboard for collaboration and information sharing. We enhance established behaviour," he says.
Devised by five Massachusetts Institute of Technology postgraduate students, the Mimio consists of a sensor bar connected to a PC through a serial port.
The bar clips to the side of the whiteboard, and the whiteboard pens are put in holders containing infrared and ultrasound transmitters. The infrared tells the bar which colour pen is in use and starts the clock.
Two ultrasound transducers on the bar pick up signals from the pen 87 times a second and, by triangulation, record what is being written.
Individual screens can be captured, or the whole whiteboard session can be played back.
Mr Shanley says the Mimio files are very small - less than 2Mb uncompressed for a six-hour whiteboard session.
"You can send someone a Mimio file of a brainstorming session and they can see the whole flow of ideas and decisions."
The Mimio software includes APIs (application programming interfaces), allowing files to be exported into a wide variety of standard document types, or incorporated into other applications.
It comes with Microsoft Net Meeting. The Mimio pen can also be used as a computer mouse, either with the whiteboard or with an LCD projector.
Mr Shanley says there are about eight million whiteboards installed in Japan alone.
About 700,000 new boards are sold each year, along with eight million PCs, 50,000 LCD projectors and about 35,000 electronic copying boards.
