scanR lets you copy, scan with your cameraphone

Now that crappy cameraphones are getting a little less crappy, a whole new realm of possibilities has opened up by leveraging a phone's data capabilities to do more than just send grainy drunken pics to your friends. scanR is one company which sees a bright future in connected cams, and they've built a back-end system that accepts digital photos and uses some heavy duty servers to convert pics into a usable format or tease info out of the images. Their first implementation of this tech allows you to use your one-megapixel-or-higher cam as a de facto scanner/copier by sending captured images to scanR where they are cleaned up and emailed back to you as a PDF. As camera resolutions get higher, all sorts of possibilities open up, such as OCR and language translation, which can supposedly be easily added to the scanR kernel.

[jared @ Jan 5th 2006 12:03PM]

All the more reason for companies to fear the devices their employees tote in with them everyday.

[LS @ Jan 5th 2006 12:08PM]

I've wanted to do OCR with my camera-enabled mobile phone for ages but for no other reason than I thought it'd be kinda cool. fingers crossed the next slew of 3MP camera phones will quickly lead to some James Bond style data capture.

p.s. anyone know what phone that is in the photo above? Looks pretty neat.

[LS @ Jan 5th 2006 12:10PM]

ah crap nevermind I just saw the next news item....

[Flash @ Jan 5th 2006 12:20PM]

I think if the development of the mobile technologies will keep the current speed, there won't be a need to use outer service. All the operations like OCR, noise reduction will be able to be performed on the phone.

[Tom Boucher @ Jan 5th 2006 12:45PM]

I bet a lot of security guys just crapped their pants...



Talk about a nightmare in classified, secure, confidential, whatever areas of a company. Phones will be banned...ugh.

[TD @ Jan 5th 2006 1:47PM]

Is there a link ? I want to read more about this ... ps...( I'm pretty sure that phone is a Treo 650 )...

[James Miller @ Jan 5th 2006 2:05PM]

What ever happened with face recognition in camera phones? I seem to remember something out of last year's CES about that, but then never saw it again...

[Vic @ Jan 5th 2006 2:22PM]

The new OneNote from Microsoft supports 2 way sync(WM5smartphone/PC) with OCR for business cards and the like. Kind of scary if you ask me. But I will have it.

[Pete M @ Jan 5th 2006 4:05PM]

That's cool.

I remember seeing that the next version of Microsoft OneNote mobile will be able to take pictures of eg: a business card, and then the info on the business card (like the name / address) will be searchable by the program.

[Rick @ Jan 5th 2006 5:29PM]

Funny, I have been watching a company in Europe that has been doing this for a while now. Anyone heard of Realeyes3D, neat stuff google it.

[Deluxe @ Jan 5th 2006 7:18PM]

PDF? Please, that's the most useless frustrating and overrated file format that exists. Plain text for me, please.

[acidreflux @ Jan 5th 2006 9:16PM]

First, with the Treo, I dont think any security is at risk. You have to be a inch from a page, to take a picture, that results in an inch of text. Any other camera phone, maybe, but not the treo.



Second, slap in some semacode capabilities, and that would be a nice little package for a camera phone.

[unangst @ Jan 8th 2006 11:22AM]

You've got to give them a link:

http://www.scanR.com ... this would be a courtesy to your readers...