RocketBook: Cloud-Integrated Microwavable Notebook

Rocketbook is able to digitize all your notes and store them in the cloud, and then clear all the pages so you can write on them again. Joe Lemay, a former Salesforce employee who co-founded Rocket Innovations with Boston entrepreneur Jake Epstein, said that Rocketbook was initially conceived as a consumer product, helping people seamlessly upload notes to various cloud services like Dropbox and Google Drive using the Rocketbook app.

How RocketBook Works

The whole functionality of the Rocketbook hinges on the smartphone app and a group of seven symbols that appear on the bottom of each page. Basically, imagine that you take notes for a meeting across several pages and you want to upload the notes as a seamless document into a work folder on a Dropbox account, an archives folder on your work Google Drive account and a backup folder on your personal Google Drive account.

‘Send hand written notes to the cloud, perfectly organized.’

On the app, you would assign each folder and account combination to one of the symbols that appear in the notebook and then, for each page you want to upload, you would check off the appropriate symbols on each page.

That’s when the Rocketbook app’s sophisticated scanning camera comes into play. When Lemay showed how it works, I was impressed not only by the speed of the scanning, but also by how crisp and clean the scanned images were. So when you scan each notebook page, the checked symbols will tell the app which specific folders and accounts to upload the notes. There’s also an option to share the pages through other services like Slack.

‘This reusable paper notebook can be erased with 30 seconds in a microwave’

The other neat thing about the Rocketbook is that it’s not a one-time use notebook. If you use Pilot Frixion Erasable Gel Pens, you can put the notebook into a microwave for 30 seconds and all of the ink will be removed (this can be done about 20 times before it starts to wear and tear).

When it comes to the business-to-business side, Lemay said Rocket needs to figure out a marketing strategy first, and that is one of the company’s next steps after it sends the Rocketbook out to Indiegogo backers now. But there’s another B2B angle in the works: enterprise integration. The company already got a taste of that when Microsoft approached the company and donated $5,000 to the Indiegogo campaign in exchange for Rocketbook including OneNote support.

Similar to this Google showcased the Connected Notepad to Google Business Service.