On September 7, Kokuyo will release its CamiApp series of smartphone-friendly paper notepads. These enable handwritten notes to be photographed with a smartphone’s camera, digitized and edited.

“These products are paper notebooks. They’re used with a special-purpose application, which you download to your iPhone or Android phone. The CamiApp series has features on both the paper and application sides that make it easy to photograph and digitize handwritten content clearly. So far, other companies have offered notepads with marks that enable clear photography using special-purpose applications. But we wanted to make such products a bit more widely usable, so we’ve worked to make CamiApp more functional. Our application makes taking pictures easy, even with a digital camera.”

CamiApp automatically compensates for tilting and distortion when a picture is taken, using AR markers or a black frame. An industry-first feature of CamiApp is tag setting, which allows for data searching and management. The user can fill in category markers, which are printed at the top of the page, for seven types of tags. The information recorded can be e-mailed straight from the application, and used in EVERNOTE and Dropbox cloud services.

CamiApp’s editing capabilities, include a highlighter function, graphics features, and an eraser.

“We’re a manufacturer of conventional stationery. But naturally, our customers also use mobile devices, cloud services, and social media. So we thought we should offer a product that gives notebooks greater affinity with social media, and makes them easier to use. To start with, we’re releasing eight versions of CamiApp. The smallest one is an A7 pad. Among the larger sizes, there’s a B5 ring-bound notebook, an unlined adhesive-bound notebook, and a grid-lined type. In total, there are eight types.”

The application for the iPhone was released in August, and the Android version will be available in early September. The application also supports English, and Kokuyo plans to expand the CamiApp line-up of notepads, with a view to marketing it overseas.

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