I had an interesting conversation with Harvey Spencer at this week’s Kodak Executive Summit. Harvey was particularly keen on the potential for digital phones as mobile capture devices. His opinion was that there was huge potential now that 3 MP camera phones were starting to come into the market (the minimum he thought it was possible to do reasonable full page capture with a camera).
He showed me a couple of examples that were quite interesting.
The first was full page capture of a page of text using the camera phone. The camera image was downloaded to the PC and then converted to pdf. The conversion using Nuance was perfect, including conversion of e-mail and web links. He also ran conversion of the same image into editable Microsoft Word. This was also run through ABBYY OCR with very excellent results. Very cool.
The second example was capture of business card contact information on the phone. OCRing of the information was done within the phone using ABBYY to the phone contact database, with synching back to Exchange. There was only one minor error on the phone OCR.
I think Harvey is onto something here. The advent of 3 MP camera phones is making this type of mobile scanning a possibility. It also creates a real business justification/differentiation for upgraded phones, since most phones can now do calling, mailing, and texting reasonably well.
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