Anoto

Anoto AB

Type	Public (Nasdaq Stockholm: ANOT)
Predecessor	C Technologies
Headquarters	Lund, Sweden
Revenue	459 MSEK
Operating income	8.9 MSEK
Number of employees	110
Website	http://www.anoto.com

Anoto Group AB (former C Technologies) is a Swedish technology company that develops and licenses digital pens. With around 110 employees, the company is headquartered in Lund, Sweden, with offices in Boston, Basingstoke and Wetherby (in the UK), and Tokyo.

Anoto's main product is the Anoto Digital Pen, a combination of ordinary ink pen and a digital camera (and supporting hardware) that digitally records everything written with the pen. It works by recognizing a special non-repeating dot pattern printed on the paper. The non-repeating nature of the pattern means that the pen is able to determine which page is being written on, and where on the page the pen is.

The dot pattern can be printed on a professional offset printing press or on a laser printer. Dots are printed in black; other colors of ink are invisible to the pen's IR sensor. On a color laser printer, CMY can be mixed to produce a near-black color that is human-readable. For offset printing, Anoto developed an ink color called "Anoto substitute black", a non-carbon-based black ink that is invisible in the IR region, allowing the user to include human-readable black marks with the dot pattern without interference.

While some of Anoto's licensees have targeted the consumer sector, with, for example, learning toys, most licensees sell their products to solution providers who put together customized vertical market systems. Anoto also sells a software development kit (SDK), numerous software applications, the Anoto Forms Solution (AFS). In addition, Anoto sells an ASIC design for the image processing component of the pen; most pen licensees use the same basic design of optical assembly and pen internals. Anoto has approximately 350 partners, primarily in Europe, the United States, and Japan.