ReadWriteWeb

If you own a scanner, chances are you are using Nuance's Windows-based PaperPort software, the tool that has been bundled with scanners for more than 20 years. Today the company introduced version 14 of the venerable utility, a new iOS app and a cloud-based scanning solution called PaperPort Anywhere.

What is interesting is how Nuance has taken a piece of desktop PC software that has been around so long and incorporated these more modern innovations, to make a powerful way to leverage how we work between cloud and desktop programs and enable users to more closely tie in cloud storage with their desktop files.

First there were bar codes, then there were QR codes, now there are zebras. StripeSpotter, a program co-developed by researchers at the University of Illinois, Chicago and Princeton University scans the distinctive stripes on a zebra.

The open-source system, which focuses on field photographs of zebras, can be used to associate field notes on a given animal, with the distinctive pattern, to track them through their life cycle.

"From paper cards to email contacts." This is Part Two of a two-part post. The first part is here.

As noted earlier, I had the opportunity to put e-business cards to a real-world test this past week at the DEMO conference. While I found a somewhat workable solution for sending out my contact info to others, I still collected a large stack of paper business cards from the people I met. These cards had to be digitized in order for them to be of any use to me. While people with administrative assistants are fortunate to have this tiresome data entry process handled for them, those of us without are stuck doing it ourselves. We can either sit at the keyboard for hours or use a scanner. Shouldn't there be a better way?