Sat 25 Nov 2006
Some of you may have experienced using ShoZu, a third party application that allows us to send pictures, videos and music from our S60 phones to various blogging services, including Flickr and YouTube. Last Tuesday, ShoZu announced cooperation with Qipit to allow S60 phone users capture and share digital documents.
Qipit, the first consumer service for turning any written or printed information into a clear, crisp digital copy that can be stored and shared on the go, and ShoZu, the leading free service for quickly and easily accessing, saving and sharing photos, podcasts, videos and music, today announced the integration of qipit with ShoZu Share-It for camera phone users.
How does it look like in reality? The pictures below show an example. The left picture shows the original image captured from Nokia N73. The left picture shows the document generated by Qipit. This document is one page from Bruce Eckel’s Thinking in C++ book which is available on the Internet for free.
Not bad, isn’t it? We can now use our S60 phones as document scanner… 
How can we do that?
- Firstly, you need ShoZu account and Qipit account. ShoZu service is free. If you are new to ShoZu, read my previous blog. Qipit has a limited free service that allows us to upload 100 documents. They are planning to introduce premium service in the future.
- Secondly, you need to activate your ShoZu and Qipit account. Activating ShoZu is done via the application on the phone. Activating Qipit is done via by clicking a link from their email confirmation.
- Before capturing any documents, you need to add Qipit as one destination on your ShoZu. To do this, launch ShoZu and select Share-It | Destinations. Next, select Options | Add new destination | Qipit. Enter your user name there.
- Now you are ready to capture and send documents to Qipit. Once you take picture, you can send it to Qipit server. After that, you will receive the result in PDF format via email.
Compatible devices: S60 2nd, 3rd, Nokia Nseries, Nokia Eseries.
Other Links: Document Management Software provides and effiecent way to keep your business organized
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November 26th, 2006 at 12:59 am
Does the PDF file include selectable text, or is it just a PDFed-image?
Steve
November 26th, 2006 at 1:04 am
@Steve: Unfortunately, the PDF contains only scanned image. I don’t think they have integrated OCR in their service. May be in the future, who knows…
November 26th, 2006 at 5:12 am
So there’s no benefit at all then over simply taking the picture and using the image in JPG form? What a wasted opportunity!
I find it very useful snapping whiteboards at presentations, charts on library walls, even documents, as shown in the example, and then blowing them up for perusal later on the PC screen….
Steve
November 26th, 2006 at 9:46 am
@Steve: You’re right. It is the same with taking pictures in JPG format and then use Photoshop (or other software on the PC) to edit them. What they offer right now is the editing process.
Of course, it would be nice if they integrate OCR in their last step.
November 28th, 2006 at 12:58 am
Thanks for your comment Antony. Well, I never thought of that..but Steve has a good point.
November 28th, 2006 at 11:59 am
I’ve been using a company called scanr for mobile scanning for a while now. They auto-tag the contents of all my documents with keywords so I can search for them later. They also claim to have a business card reader, which I haven’t tried yet. It has been quite useful.
November 28th, 2006 at 10:53 pm
@Bob: Thanks for the hint. I just tried the service and it seems not supporting OCR either. Am I doing something wrong?
November 29th, 2006 at 2:19 pm
on documents, i don’t think they expose the text, but its buried in the pdf file somewhere. i haven’t really looked for it, but i know when i use desktop search it finds all my scanr processed information. i just tried out a business card with my n73 and the results were impressive.
November 30th, 2006 at 5:15 pm
@Steve: I work for Realeyes3D on the qipit team. We believe there is an enormous value to consumers for creating mobile copies to keep or to share. Currently our main focus is on the core process of transforming pictures of documents taken in almost any lightning condition, into legible and printable copies, on the go. So the benefit with qipit is that—with a couple of clicks from your camera phone—you are not just getting a photo image, but a clear legible document that can be faxed or used in many more scenarios than simply a photo of a document. Any alternate editing process using Photoshop would require a PC (not very mobile) and takes several minutes, as it involves several complex steps such as deskewing, preserving aspect ratio, and cleaning shadows—which is what qipit does automatically for you.
November 30th, 2006 at 10:35 pm
@Conrad: Thanks for the clarification.