A digital pen invented at Microsoft's Beijing lab will allow
people to switch effortlessly between electronic documents and
paper.
Wang’s digital pen also reflects an ongoing transformation in
the process of invention at some large corporate labs, a
hybridization of the lone inventor and traditional corporate
R&D. Wang is the pen’s lead inventor, and it is his insight,
daring, and creativity that have largely driven the effort to
develop it. But at the same time, he could not have made such rapid
progress without Microsoft’s collective expertise in pattern
recognition algorithms, computer vision, handwriting technologies,
and text-editing software. “Personally, I’m really excited about
it,” says Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research,
whose main facility is in Redmond, WA. “It’s an example of a new
kind of product incubation that we do,...one that brings together
people with many different skills to solve a unique problem.”
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