Bouchard has been on the job since last month, but Livescribe is just now announcing that he has taken the helm from Jim Marggraff. Marggraff will remain on the company’s board and will be a part-time adviser, Bouchard said.

Among his goals, Bouchard said, are strengthening the company’s partnerships and building wireless connectivity into future pens. All of its current products have to be docked with a computer to share data.

“We have to be a step function from where we are in terms of cross-device support,” Bouchard told AllThingsD. In addition, he said that the product is still too hard to explain to consumers.

By writing on special paper, Livescribe’s “smartpens” are able to capture all of the data written, as well as syncing that data with recorded audio notes. This “paper replay” feature allows students, reporters and others to move easily between different parts of a class or meeting.

The pens have found something of a niche, big enough to find their way onto shelves of Best Buy and Staples, but not yet enough to get the five-year-old company out of “investment mode.”

The company had said last year that it expected to sell its millionth digital pen before the end of 2011. A Livescribe representative said the company fell “just shy” of that goal, and expects to hit the mark early this year.

As part of taking the job, Bouchard said he knew the company would need more resources than it is generating from its current digital pen business. Bouchard said the company has raised a further $10 million in commitments from existing investors — payments that will be made over the course of 2012.

“I ended up voting with my feet and they ended up voting with their wallets,” Bouchard said in an interview.

It has only just announced its IPO plans, but Groupon is already getting a bitter taste of the brutality of being more public in an increasing series of negative reports aimed at its business prospects and execs.

That has included a spate of posts after it filed to go public last week about the unusual accounting treatment in an S-1 regulatory filing for the offering, which also showed a large outflow of its venture funding to the pockets of the Chicago-based social buying site’s founders.

Since then, though, the gloves seem to be off for Groupon, just as it starts to market itself to Wall Street investors.

Perhaps the toughest so far has been one written by Fortune’s Kevin Kelleher, painting a very sketchy investing portrait of the company’s Chairman and co-founder Eric Lefkofsky.

Wrote Kelleher in a piece titled “The Checkered Past of Groupon’s Chairman”:

But Groupon’s IPO has brought an uncomfortable spotlight onto Lefkofsky. While some attention focuses on his ambitions as an investor in tech start-ups, others see a “spotty history” and draw parallels between the past and the present. Lefkofsky’s track record, reflecting failures and successes, bears certain hallmarks: Rapid revenue growth accompanied by big losses, a penchant to sell stock early on, and lawsuits filed by investors, lenders or customers who feel they have been wronged.

Ouch.

While one of the lawsuits mentioned in the piece was dismissed with prejudice, it did not help that the piece included an early email used in the case, written by Lefkofsky in the Web 1.0 era, that read in part:

“Lets start having fun…lets get funky…let’s announce everything…let’s be WILDLY positive in our forecasts…lets take this thing to the extreme…if we get wacked [sic] on the ride down-who gives a shit…THE TIME TO GET RADICAL IS NOW…WE HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE…”

Double ouch, even if it is probably a bit unfair to use such rookie remarks from a young entrepreneur back then to reflect on him today.

Still, Lefkofsky — whom I met with recently at Groupon’s HQ and found as whip-smart and savvy as any Silicon Valley sharpie — does seem to need to be more circumspect in his utterances today.

Most specifically, the day after its IPO filing, he told Bloomberg in an interview that Groupon will be “wildly profitable,” referencing worries about losses unveiled in its financial statements and his past record of start-ups.

Said Lefkofsky on June 3:

“I’m going to be in technology for a long time. I’m going to start a lot of companies. These are not sham companies. These are great businesses. InnerWorkings is profitable. Echo is profitable. Groupon is going to be wildly profitable.”

While sources said it is unlikely that Groupon will be forced by the Securities and Exchange Commission to make a new filing due to the remarks, it’s just the kind of mistake the typically voluble company needs to avoid going forward.

In other words, no more words from Groupon.

The company’s signature product is a “smartpen” that writes with standard ink, but captures audio and uses special paper so that, in addition to showing up on paper, the notes are also recorded digitally for transfer to a computer. The new Livescribe Connect service, being announced on Monday, allows the digital notes and audio recordings to be sent from to a variety of other programs and services, including Evernote, Google Docs and Facebook. Users will also be able to mark their notes to be sent as a PDF document via e-mail the next time the pen is docked.

CEO Jim Marggraff said at an event for reporters that the shift to smart wireless devices has highlighted the fact that, although his company’s product has helped allow handwritten notes go digital, “the Livescribe smartpen remains a disconnected device in a connected world.”

The Livescribe Connect service is designed to take a step toward addressing that, but still requires the pen be docked to a computer in order to send notes via e-mail or transfer them to another program. Though not sharing any details, Marggraff acknowledged that a wireless connection from the pen would be the next logical step.

Livescribe, which demoed its first smartpen back at D5 in 2007, is also adding a 2GB, $99 version of its Echo smartpen.

The Livescribe Connect service will work with all of the companies Echo and older Pulse pens. Most of the connectors will be free for all pen owners, while connections to Google Docs and e-mail will require the purchase of a $15 upgrade for owners of the older Pulse pens or those who buy the new entry-level Echo pen.