When the engineers at Rocketbook wanted to expand to the whiteboard market, they noticed that the only current options were overproduced and high cost. Smartboards require hardware for the board and the markers, and software to run the system. Team Rocket wanted to create a device based on their existing Optical Character Recognition software without requiring users to buy a physical board. Their solution is the Rocketboard, A New Digital Universe for Old Whiteboards. The Rocketboard is running a Kickstarter funding campaign for their first run of production parts.
The innovation in this system is contained mostly in the app and the group’s existing Optical Character Recognition. The four ‘beacons’ are restickable black triangles that users can place onto a whiteboard and then capture the information written on the board. The app allows users to have seven separate destinations for the whiteboard information at any time. Email, Dropbox, Evernote, Google Docs, OneNote, Slack, Box, OneDrive, iMessage, iCloud, and others currently work with the app. A Broadcast Mode also gives the user a URL to send to team members that can then see the information every time the board is scanned, or an auto-scan that takes place every five seconds. Placing double hashtags around a character string will automatically use that character string for the title of the scan.
Beacons can be cut to smaller size if the user has a small or medium whiteboard. The Kickstarter community is apparently hungry for this type of technology and several questions have been asked in the comments, most focusing on which surfaces can use the Rocketboard system. Sheets of paper can be used if the beacons are cut very small, cinderblock walls painted white are currently being tested, sticky notes have not been tested, role-playing battle maps will be tested, blackboards and black glass boards are not recommended (but one commenter suggested taking a photo and modifying it to negative mode), and most testing is done on 24 x 36 inch boards but testing will find the max size recommended by the group. The already successful campaign ends on February 1, 2019.