Scan it — or Quipit?
July 15, 2009 by Steve HannafordPosted in: In this week's e-newsletter, Latest News & Views, Solutions
You know the scene in the spy movie. The hero finally gets into the room and opens the safe with the documents, whether the plans for the new weapon or the proof of the villain’s crimes.
So he (or she) takes out his concealed mini-camera and snaps the photos while the villain’s henchmen are about to burst into the room. The critical thing is to get the film to the authorities (usually accomplished after a long martial arts scene and desperate chase through the night.)
Well, now that spy can use Quipit. This product from an Austrian company turns your cell phone camera into a document scanner. The scans are transmitted to the company’s servers, where they are cleaned up, translated using OCR software, and tagged, ready for reading.
It’s an interesting twist on digital document scanning, and, aside from the spy uses, may be just what’s needed for someone on the road or in an archive where you can’t remove the material. It could also be used to confirm a contract on the spot, save a whiteboard, save handwritten notes, or to quickly backup information passing over your desk. This is a great supplement to standard desk-bound document scanning.
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Tags: document scanning, Quipit, scanner
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July 16th, 2009 at 3:34 am
This could raise security concerns as it could let insiders steal confidential information much more easily. However it is very useful for people like students to take photos of reference texts, but again this makes copyright violations much easier.
July 17th, 2009 at 11:34 am
Steve – Thanks for the post on Qipit. Your post sparks the imagination of some of our favorite spy thrillers, but Qipit has a much larger appeal than to just the 007s of the world. For people like you and me, Qipit eliminates the need for a bulky traditional scanner or a land line to use a traditional fax. Qipit runs patented algorithms that take a dark photograph of written or printed information and create a crisp clean ink-on-white digital copy. These easy-to-read copies can be printed (using less ink) and shared. You can email it (as a PDF), fax it, publish it online (with a unique URL) or even embed it in your blog. In addition to scanning documents, Qipit is also used to capture whiteboards, flipcharts, expense receipts, you name it and someone is probably using Qipit to copy it. Qipit is a mobile copy, fax and scanning machine in your pocket. We have an office in Paris and San Francisco, no connection to Austria at this point.
July 21st, 2009 at 12:15 pm
I have used software such as this before, its quick and convienent but requires massive amounts of post processing to get good quality scans (and OCR results) but useful for espionage!