The increasingly global economy of the 21st century will require managers and professionals to face an ever-wider set of competitors. As the bandwidth of the Internet backbone becomes wider and cheaper and as the capabilities of personal computers expand, creative work will be as easy to commission with someone across the world as it now is with someone across the street. [Ta95]

To respond to this expansion of competition, the intellectual workforce will have to work smarter and harder, keeping an eye out for every new opportunity and technology. This sort of work requires a great deal of reading, but carrying books around is physically taxing, especially if you want to have reference books on hand as well.

To address the challenges of the 21st century, we present the Lap Pilot.

• The Lap Pilot works everywhere -- Long, boring flights can be productive with the Lap Pilot. You can bring along all of the reading and reference materials that you need without hauling abroad dozens of pounds of cumbersome paper in your briefcase. Just pack the five-pound Lap Pilot and the appropriate PC cards!
• The Lap Pilot can be every book -- The expansion of digital libraries and advances in scanning and optical character recognition are making more and more texts available in electronic form. The Lap Pilot gives you access to these e-books and allows you to annotate them "naturally" -- with a stylus on a touch screen.
• The Lap Pilot can provide integrated reference -- Don't know a word? Just pass your stylus over it, and the Lap Pilot will automatically give you its dictionary definition and/or encyclopedia entry.
• The Lap Pilot can organize sources -- By using a paper-based metaphor rather than a desktop metaphor, the Lap Pilot makes organizing sources topically and linking between topics intuitive and easy.