Nuwa Pen

Smart Pens are nothing new. During the past decade, we have seen interesting attempts of trying to digitize the millennia-old pen and paper. A stylus and tablet were popular alternatives for quite a while until people wanted the actual experience of writing on paper but still wanted it digitized. The next generation of the smart pen used a camera to see what is written on a smart paper that has code embedded in the paper to help the pen know where things are being written. 

Now comes Nuwa Pen. A smart pen that can be written on any paper and still be digitized. How you may ask? A super-sensitive camera, sensors, and AI. One of the biggest pet peeves of needing smart paper is its high cost and lack of freedom. The Nuwa pen promises to be able to write on any paper and still be perfectly recorded. 

The subscription software of the Nuwa Pen can analyze your writing and convert it into text, which is nothing new, but not offered on all smart pen sets. One strong selling point of the Nuva Pen is the app’s ability to work in unison with other apps. One example in their demo is writing a date down for an appointment and it automatically being recognized as something that can be synced with your calendar. 

The Nuwa Pen is a big technological step up from the current generation of smart pens with an app you can actually use. 

Choosing a smart pen is like choosing a brand for life. Almost all of them require a subscription and specific paper to use, so you generally had to be ready to shell out money for the app and notebooks.

Nuwa is still subscription based if you want the full functionality of the app. The free version just converts your writing to text and unlimited cloud storage. While prices are generally within the same range of each other, about $3 a month, the Nuwa Pen does offer the most value. 

It can convert writing to text like all of the other apps but is supposed to be able to sync with many of your other apps like Google Suite apps, as well as your favorite productivity, design, and task management apps,. 

The Nuva Pen is not released yet but if they can fulfill their promise of a pen that doesn’t need smart paper and be able to recognize text with the power of AI and sync it with your other apps, it will surely be a strong contender in the market.  

This is Nuwa Pen’s first campaign on Kickstarter. The Founder and CEO Marc Tuinier has had a few years of experience at another company involved in pens and the digitization of writing and has commented that this is his third crowdfunding campaign. 

Their office in The Netherlands has a team of 10 individuals skilled in their respective fields of embedded engineering, software development, advanced computer graphics algorithms, and operations. 

They also have funding from the European Regional Development fund so you know they mean business when a government is funding them. 

Looking at the comment section of the campaign page, we can see that people have SUPER-specific questions about the pen. From questions about engineering to how the software works, the Nuwa Pen team has answered all of their questions. 

TechCrunch got a demo of this product and was not happy. They said the prototype they got was not functioning at the same capacity as the one in the demo video on the Kickstarter video. The demo video on Kickstarter is to show how the product will act when it is complete. This is totally common in crowdfunding as the product is being developed while the campaign is in progress so you can’t expect a fully functioning prototype until much later into the campaign.  

Marc the owner has responded positively to the review, “I’m also happy that TechCrunch acknowledges our significant progress in just the last few weeks. The videos and pictures that TechCrunch shared, though, don’t show our latest results that include the output from cameras, an integral part of our product. It reflects the early stage of the development process.”

This is normal for a crowdfunding campaign that is trying to get funds to develop their smart pen, and given their team size it is understandable that there is a big rush to get the product developed in time and they probably do not have the resources and time to make a more functional prototype to send out for demos given the time constraints. 

This is a crowdfunding project done by a small team so we should have a little leeway for incomplete prototypes. 

This campaign really captures the essence of a crowdfunding project. It is bringing in new tech, and disrupting an existing industry, and is all being done by a small team. Definitely check out this campaign if you have ever wanted to digitize your writing.