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As readers of our Innovation Culture Bulletin will know, we at Springwise are strong advocates of writing by hand. The seemingly outdated process has been shown to improve cognitive thinking. For those who want the benefits of handwriting without sacrificing the convenience of editable, cloud-based documents, there is Bamboo Spark — a smart folio from Japanese startup Wacom.

The Bamboo Spark is used in combination with a smart pen. Users can place sheets of regular paper on top of the folio’s electro-magnetic resonance board and write or draw directly onto them. The pen then communicates with the board, recording the movement and markings. Users can save their workings to the cloud by pushing a button on the device. They can also sync their folio with other devices by downloading the Bamboo Spark app onto them. Works can be refined and edited in the app or exported to other cloud storage platforms including Evernote and Dropbox.

Bamboo Spark comes in three models all priced at USD 159 and is on schedule to begin retailing next month. It is the latest device to combine physical and digital note-taking tools — other such examples include Rocketbook, Smartmarker and SMART Kapp. What other analogue tools could be integrated into digital systems?