August was an auspicious month, ushering three new technologies into my life.

First was a Livescribe pen on long loan from a friend.  I spend a lot of time each month in strategy sessions with clients, which are usually very fast-paced and intense with lots of interaction.  Afterwards (sometimes long afterwards, if it’s been a busy week) I then need to write up detailed notes on the session for my clients.  Deciphering and fleshing out my rapidly handwritten notes and sketches is often very difficult!

This is where the Livescribe pen shines.  As you take notes, it simultaneously records an audio transcript of the conversation.  Afterwards, just by tapping the pen on a spot in your notes you can hear the conversation played back from that exact moment when you were writing!  Invaluable!  (The pen writes on special paper and tracks where it is on each page through a tiny camera under the nib).

The notes can then also be uploaded from the pen onto your computer, and the same magic is available on the screen - click on a piece of writing and hear the conversation from that point.  Plus you can drop the notes and audio into a standard PDF with the same functionality, to share with clients.

This has proved a lifesaver for me with notes … but it does mean carrying around the pen and its charger/cable, plus purchasing the special paper (about R100 per large 200 page book, from Smartscribe SA), and so I’m starting to think about rather doing the same on an iPad (now that FNB are offering iPads for R200 pm).  There are already several iPad Apps (Notability, PaperDesk, SoundNote) that link audio recordings to typed notes, and several companies plan to offer this for handwritten notes soon too.

Right!  Now that I can decipher all my notes, I store all the points from a session for future reference in one of my many mindmaps for clients, using the superb free XMind program that I’ve been using for all my creative work for years.

Now, I still have to type up detailed notes on all my sessions … and I’m not a very fast typist!  To the rescue, this month’s second new technology: Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11.

I’d been hearing very good reports about this product for a long time and finally invested in it.  Worth every cent!  It is uncannily accurate, and with it I can knock out several thousand words in an afternoon without breaking a sweat.  One caveat: the program is very resource-intensive, and tends to “lock out” other programs that use your sound card, so I generally only fire it up when I need to do a lot of writing, after which you usually need to reboot your system to get it ‘back in the groove’ again.

Finally, at the end of the month, compliments of my latest Vodacom upgrade, I got a free iPhone 4.  It is every bit as amazing as I expected … more on this in the future..