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Scott Kirsner | Innovation Economy

Startups seek to capture fragile ideas

The MassChallenge marketing team -- (from left) Jeff Danford, Jibran Malek and Robby Bitting -- test Bounce, a new app from IdeaPaint that helps capture whiteboard notes from meetings.Wendy Maeda/Globe Staff/Globe Staff

In January, Joe Lemay and Jake Epstein had a eureka moment involving erasable pens, notebooks, and a microwave. When you rub an eraser against the heat-sensitive ink from certain erasable pens, friction causes the writing to vanish. So what would happen if you put a notebook full of writing into a microwave?

Early experiments at Lemay’s home in Melrose weren’t encouraging. Notebooks with plastic covers burned and smoldered. Paper warped and ruffled. “My office now smells like a campfire site,” Lemay said. But the jottings made with the erasable pens did disappear.

Lemay and Epstein are among a new wave of entrepreneurs trying to solve an ancient problem. Since we began to write on papyrus (3000 BC) and whiteboards (mid-1900s), we’ve encountered the problem of lost ideas. Scraps of paper go astray; brilliant diagrams get erased. If only there were a way to capture ideas in digital form before they were lost — perhaps using that powerful computing device we hold in our hands for most of our waking hours.

One of the most successful startups in idea capture, Evernote , has Boston roots. In 2007, Phil Libin, a Boston University-educated entrepreneur, and some of his friends began thinking about how smartphones coupled with cloud-based data storage could help people remember everything, keeping notes, to-do lists, and business cards organized.

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Libin and company moved to California in 2007 to join forces with another startup. Evernote offers free apps and storage but also sells higher-end plans for a $5 or $10 monthly fee; last May, the Silicon Valley company said it had surpassed 100 million users and raised $290 million in venture capital.

Boston-based IdeaPaint , which makes paint that turns any wall into a whiteboard, plans to release a new app next month called Bounce , developed in collaboration with Boston advertising agency Hill Holliday. Say you sketch out the pieces of a new project on your wall covered with IdeaPaint. You can use the app to snap a picture, note who will be responsible for each element, and then e-mail it to your team members.

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“There’s an ephemeral nature to meetings,” IdeaPaint cofounder Jeff Avallon said. “With the new app, we were thinking about how we could extend that momentum you have when you’re brainstorming.”

Lemay, the notebook-nuker, had initially thought about whiteboards when he cofounded Rocket Innovation last year. He and his two cofounders were working on a smartphone app that would enable people to broadcast what was being drawn or written on a whiteboard to colleagues anywhere in the world. But when they posted the idea to the funding site Kickstarter, it raised less than one-third of the $75,000 they’d hoped to collect. So the trio regrouped.

With their microwave experiments earlier this year, they were testing the idea of creating the last notebook you’d ever need to buy. The concept? You’d write in the notebook, use a smartphone app to digitize the notes, and then microwave the notebook to erase the writing, allowing you to fill the notebook again.

In March, at the Launch Festival startup conference in San Francisco, they demonstrated how their new app, Rocketbook, could be used to quickly capture everything in the notebook as a user flipped the pages, and then upload the drawings and writing to a cloud-based data storage service, like Google Docs or Evernote. The app could recognize icons on the pages of the notebook, so that it could put grocery lists into one virtual folder, your daughter’s drawings in another, and work projects in a third.

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After it had been digitized, Lemay explained in the demo, the notebook could be erased, “using this special piece of equipment that we brought with us, on loan from MIT — the Rocket Reset Chamber.” Epstein, wearing a white lab coat and sunglasses, pulled a drop cloth off a microwave to laughter from the crowd. After microwaving the notebook for 30 seconds, the writing vanished. Lemay announced the company had just started a new crowdfunding campaign online.

Of course, there is a big threat to products like Rocketbook — the possibility that we stop using paper, stop writing entirely, and capture all our ideas by typing them directly into laptops or touching the screens of tablets and phones.

Lemay acknowledged that possibility but said his startup is making the bet that people are using digital devices — like the laptop I used to type notes during our face-to-face interview — not because they love the technology but because notes taken on paper are so hard to archive and later find. “We think bringing digital capabilities to the notebook is going to give it new life,” Lemay said.

And there’s some early data to back him up. Since the company launched its new fund-raising campaign in March, it has raised more than $600,000 from consumers eager to get their hands on a Rocketbook and the companion app. For $35, they were offering a Rocketbook and a three-pack of the heat-sensitive pens, made by Pilot. They hope to start shipping in July.

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The next tough challenge for Rocket Innovations, IdeaPaint, and all the other pioneers of analog-to-digital idea capture: trying to make sense of all that chicken scratch on boards, walls, and paper, and transforming it into clear, readable text and drawings.


Scott Kirsner can be reached at kirsner@pobox.com. Follow him on Twitter @ScottKirsner and on betaboston.com.