AIIM Distributed Capture Webinar

Yes, we've heard a lot of talk in our industry about distributed capture and its benefits. But here's a Webinar that promises to explore some of its dark side. Sounds good, because I've definitely talked to a few systems administrators who have been more than happy to extol their reasons for not liking distributed catpure.

Microsoft and ODF

People are probably right to be suspicious of this.

Digital Camera Capture

ABBYY has licensed its OCR software to scanR - this company that offers to convert document and whiteboard images captured with digital cameras - into searchable PDFs.

New Canon Workgroup Scanner

Canon seems to be competing directly with some of HP's lower-end models with this one.

E-mail archiving numbers

Ten-fold growth in four years - from $796 million this year to almost $8 billion in 2010.

Xerox, Visioneer in the News

It looks like Xerox has introduced another interesting update to its DocuShare ECM product. We've generally heard good things about this inexpensive platform and it looks like they've hit quite a few hot points with version 5.0. This includes improved collaboration, workflow, and records management. Also, hats off to Visioneer Sales and Marketing VP Don McMahan for his recognition by CRN. Seems, the sheer number of VARs Visioneer has signed up in the past year has attracted some attention. Looks like another big year for workgroup scanner sales all around.

Fujitsu mid-volume production scanner

Ran across a couple interesting things while doing some Web research today. First, this listing for the fi-5900C has shown up on the FCPA Web site. Looks like FCPA is trying to go upstream pretty far and compete with the higher end Kodak i600 and Bowe Bell & Howell Spectrum stuff. I'm assuming they're going to come in with a very attractive price, because I haven't heard too many poor performance reports about the two aforementioned scanners. Also, it seems Bowe Bell & Howell has expanded its support agreement Kodak.

ACS Child Support

ACS continues to dominate the child support payment processing market. We recently did a story discussing how they had licensed some technology from Denver-based Open Scan, after Open Scan beat them out for a few contracts.

Homeland security

This is interesting. I know document imaging, taxonomy, and search companies all stood to benefit from upgraded homeland security. I guess this begs the question - because our technology actually saves money, does it become more imperative in these types of processes now?

Googe Buys Word Processing Company

What do you think the desktop is going to look like in 10 years?

SAT Snafu

Here's an article that details some of the reasons for the mistakes that were made recently on SAT scoring. It seems less-than-perfect OMR performance is at least partially to blame. Pearson NCS gets hit pretty hard in this article.

Here's the response we got from Scantron's Tim Dubes when we asked him to comment on the situation:

"While we really don't want to be perceived as grave dancers--and keep in mind that even state of the art OMR is not going to produce 100% accurate results in all applications--there appears to be a number of areas that the SAT test scoring system could be improved. Remember that this is a complete solution that is being called into question, not just individual technologies. So while a significant technology advancement like Scantron's SIMR (Scantron's Intelligent Mark Recognition) can greatly improve recognition accuracy in less than optimal conditions (including damaged forms, lower confidence marks, damaged tracking marks, and the like), it is only part of an overall solution. In the case of the SAT scoring, the inability of the software to accurately flag degraded forms and marks that fall below the necessary confidence threshold could have contributed to the poor results.

"One of the key points that Scantron makes to our customers, particularly in the education field, is accountability. This means that we are responsible for all the components of the solution: we make the software application, we build our own hardware, we design & print the forms in our own facility, and we provide complete training and professional services with our own employees. Sole source accountability removes a lot of variables, and allows us to control the data capture environment, whether we are installing a customer-driven solution or providing the complete data collection solution on an outsourced basis. This also eliminates a lot of the variables from cross-vendor solutions and gives Scantron and it's customers the confidence to move forward with recognition-based technology for mission critical applications. I'm certain that the students' that are negatively affected by the SAT scoring issue would consider it to me a mission critical application."

SourceCorp acquired

This was probably bound to happen in light of the proposed acquisition activity recently surrounding ACS. Private investors seem to have developed an affinity for service businesses over the past year. Over the past year, SourceCorp seems to have put their house in order and had a good strong third quarter of '05. Wonder who could be next?

New capture devices

I'd say new scanners, but actually, Kodak's new device is a network scanstation. Here's a review of it by our friend Doug Henschen at Intelligent Enterprise.
Also, HP, the original network scan-only device vendors with their Digital Sender, have announced three new workgroup scanners. Yes, they've added true duplex capabilities and also introduced a new sheet-fed only model. The capture software, aimed at the desktop user is pretty cool also.

More detail in next week's DIR.

Stellent Dividend

This is kind of wierd. Incidentally, it seems to have helped the stock price, which has been climbing steadily since last May.Is this some kind of a new trend? Will we see more ECM companies following suit? Or, is Stellent just trying to differentiative itself and get more notice on the stock market? At the end of the year, they only had $60 million in cash and short-term investments in the bank, so they're not exactly flush with cash. We thought they might use some of that to buy a capture vendor. A dividend? Well, if it works...

RG

Dicom News

Big news out of the Dicom Group in the last couple of days. First off, on Tuesday, they announced the acquisition of LCI, an IDR software developer out of Germany. The company seems to advertise technology similar to that of SWT. It was founded by academics, however, and like Mohomine, and to some extent Neurascript, was more technology than marketing driven it appears - although Kofax told me LCI has some 70 customers.

Then, today, Dicom announced it would be discontinuing its Samsung distribution business - the SGA portion of its business. This has been in the works for a long time, and the division had been up for sale, but apparently no buyers. Once again, I'll give Dicom tremendous props for their vision to move out of this business - which I think is how the company started - and into document imaging. Ironically, it seems to have taken the hiring for a former distribution as CEO - Rob Klatell who spent more than 30 years as an executive a components distributor Arrow Electronics - to ring the final bell for SGA. I guess Klatell knows a healthy distribution arrangement when he sees one...