More on Yahoo! book scanning

Here's an interesting report on the Internet Archive-hosted book scanning party held this week in San Francisco. Apparently, Microsoft has gotten involved -- anything to counteract Google. Also, if you just want to cut to the chase, here's an excerpt into how the book scanning is apparently being handled,

"While Google has released few details of its scanning project (the search company has nondisclosure agreements with its library partners), the Internet Archive had a display of its technology at the Tuesday night event.

The Internet Archive built a specialized scanning machine and written open-source software called Scribe for the specific purpose of digitizing books. The "machine" is an assembly of a standard PC with the Scribe software installed, two Cannon EOS cameras, a pedal-operated glass and metal stand to hold and secure books at an angle, along with a table and chair. The machine looks much like a photo or voting booth, with black cloth covering a box frame and shielding the books and computer gear from ambient light.

The chair seats one person, who operates the computer program and turns book pages by hand. During the scanning process, the book sits at a 90-degree angle under glass, which protects it from the camera light and causes the least amount of damage to its pages, according to the Internet Archive. The operator pushes a pedal under the table to release the book from under the glass, and turns the page before it's ready to take another picture.

Once a picture is taken, both pages of the book appear on a computer screen in their original form. The Scribe software then finds the center of the page and makes adjustments of the picture's angle or ensures that it's cropped properly. It will also clean up any poor coloring and make it uniform.

The operator enters some metadata about the book--its author, title and publication date. And once the book is scanned, it's then saved to the system and catalogued. Scribe takes the metadata from the book and matches it with data from existing card catalogs in order to prevent duplication. The work is then added to the digital record.

It takes roughly one hour to scan two 300-page books. And it costs an estimated 10 cents a page, split among data storage, labor and equipment and administration fees, according to Brewster Kahle, the project's leader. The cost does not take into account libraries' fees for getting the book to the scanners.

Daniel Greenstein of the University of California's archive project said that his group has donated $500,000 to assess the ultimate costs of scanning from the libraries' perspective.

The Internet Archive currently has 10 scanning machines, but it is ramping up to build 10 more in the next year."

I guess our quesiton is, with all the cool book scanning technology out there that we saw at AIIM, why? I guess we'll need to call Brewster Kahle to find out.

RG

New Yorker project

If you're interested in magazine scanning, you might want to give this a listen. It's an NPR interview (5 minutes) with the project leader for the New Yorker's DjVu 8 DVD set.

RG

Other imaging stocks

Oh yeah,related to the EMC deal, I love this post on Captiva's Yahoo! message board. This sector is heating up. I just talked to a financial analyst who was all bummed because now that Captiva is off the market he needs to find someone else to cover. The problem with ScanSoft, of course, which is now known as Nuance, is that the majority of its revenue is from voice recognition. So, unless that poster is talking about the company spinning and selling off it's imaging business... to raise money for the speech business, guess it could happen, but wouldn't cause a huge jump in stock I don't think.

Anyhow, also got a couple odd press releases - maybe just the timing one was. One is that eCopy will be showing at Documentum's Momentum event. Remember that article I wrote about the ideal capture company commanding both ad hoc and batch product lines - could EMC buy eCopy.

Also, Datacap just announced it was integrating with the latest version of AIX - the old OTG document imaging application. Announced it today of all days. What's up?

Finally, looks like imaging-related stocks like FileNET,Dicom, Plasmon, and even Stellent and Xerox a little are up today. ACS is way up too but for different reasons.

Reynolds role at EMC

Of course the big news in the industry is that EMC has announced its intention to acquire Captiva for $275 million cash. Internestingly, a day following that announcement, Joe Tucci, EMC's president and CEO was appointed Chairman of EMC's board. I had understood that under SOX, the sort of single-person triumvirate was frowned upon. Not that EMC has traditionally cared what anybody has thought...

But here's the thing - even though Reynolds got cash and would seem to have every reason to step out - wouldn't he be the perfect guy to help turn EMC around. Look what he did at Captiva. We're talking less than a dollar per share just a few years ago - now he sells it for 22.25 per share. Great work. Reynolds made Captiva into a money making machine. Could he do the same thing at EMC? It's obviously a much larger business... Anyway, I'm all in favor of it - after all, we did award him our DIR Man of the Year back at AIIM.

Carry on,

RG

Kodak Digital Assets

This is an interesting story on the state of things at Eastman Kodak. It discussed the struggles the company has had in making its transition to digital. Of course, the document imaging part of the business, which we cover, was years ahead of the rest of the company in going digital with its scanners, but still has struggled to wean itself of microfilm revenue. And there has been some disastrous software activity as well.

Anyhow, the most intersting part of this story appears at the end when they discuss the four distinct reporting units for Kodak starting next year. That will give us a clear picture of who is making money and who is not at Kodak - setting the table for potential spin-offs and acquistions. Kodak has assembled quite an interesting portfolio of printing businesses to surround its document scanning technology. It will be great to see how the business model pans out. It's my guess that it will be the most successful of Kodak's four business units. Then, what do you do with it?

Stay tuned.

Microsoft PDF

It seems like after all the huffing and puffing about Metro, aka .XPS, Microsoft has come out in support of PDF. Speculation that we've seen is that the move is beibng driven by the State of Massachusetts reent announcement to go to non-proprietary document formats in all its state offices by the year 2007. According to eWeek. "As part of this new policy, the state will support the newly ratified Open Document Format for Office Applications, or OpenDocument, and PDFs (portable document format) as the standards for its office documents." That would seem like a bit of rash and quick decision to us - but perhaps Microsoft is scared getting dumped by other state offices in favor of Open Source and PDF.

One thing is for sure, we were a bit surprised when Microsoft announced Metro because we thought they would just leverage ScanSoft's rapidly improving PDF tools to create PDF in Office and really put some crunch on Acrobat. Don't know if they've leveraged ScanSoft, but they've definitely put PDF creation in Office.

RG

New Yorker Archives

Here's a link to the New Yorker back issue demo site. Maybe the best use of DjVu technology we've seen so far.


RG

World of PDF

Two interesting posts on our Web site over the past two days regarding what has been heretofore known as the World of PDF. First, the PDF/A standard was finalized by ISO.Second, as foreshadowed in a recent edition of DIR, ScanSoft has announced support of XPS - Microsoft's alternative for PDF. From what we understand there are currently about 1,000 developers that have software that can create PDF - Microsoft, of course being the notable exception. We wonder how long it will take XPS to reach that same level - if it ever does?

Also, as far as imaging goes, we've had quite a bit of dicussion recently on highly compressed PDF documents - employing segmentation and JBIG-2 technologies. We're not even sure XPS supports JBIG2 - but nonetheless, it is a Microsoft driven stnadard.


Cheers.

RG

HSA Capture Follow-up

Just returning from Harvey Spencer's capture conference held up in Glen Cove on Long Island. Had a really nice time. There were about 40 attendees - with the likes of Adobe, Kodak, Fujitsu, Ricoh, AnyDoc, Datacap, Captaris, Cranel, PDI (the people that bought VisionShape), ISIS Papyrus, ABBYY, A2iA, IBM, Kofax, Captiva and a few others all attending. The conference covered several topics, including Java programming, check image quality (with a great presention from Frank Jaffe. Probably the most interesting session to me, perhaps because I was moderating it, was a racous panel discussion on when to use a digital copier for scanning and when to use a dedcated scanner. It seems most people in the traditional imaging industry still look down on the abilities of digital copier dealers to effectively sell document imaging technology - not to mention the capabilities of the hardware itself. Well, there were certainly a lot of opinions in the room. About the best conclusion I came to is that digital copiers seem to be posiioned for ad hoc scanning of a few pages at a time and no more - but with the trend toward distributed capture vs. centralized - this ad hoc stuff is making up a growing percentage of the market.

Speaking of ad hoc, Oracle had some fairly interesting collaboration and records management stuff they just came out with. They are positioned it as "content mangement for the masses" and have some starting price at like $60 per seat. Going after SharePoint it appears. And then Adobe's John Hoye was there marketing the companies' scanning toolkit for PDF creation. Just thought those are a couple more signs that this ad hoc market is going to start growing - and may and maybe already is taking business away from traditional imaging vendors. I'll leave it at that as I think I am starting to have a flashback to some of the shouting I heard at yesterday's panel.

Hurricane Can't stop ReadSoft

ReadSoft's U.S. headquarters are in Metairie, Louisiana, just outside of New Orleans, but it turns out the company seems to have a better hurricane plan in place than the government, as it has continued operaitons without missing a beat, accoridng to Bob Fresneda, president of the Swedish forms processing vendors' U.S. operations. Fresneda, who was behind the transition of the company's North American headquarters from San Diego to Metairie a few years back, said the company set up a specific plan for evacuation in case of a hurricane like the one that hit last week. That has included relocating several of its 25 U.S. employees to its Chicago office. ReadSoft also moved it's e-mail server software to Sweden and has maintained its 800 support line without much a break. Fresneda said that all of ReadSoft employees are safe and that the damage to the Meatrie area was not nearly as bad as some of the other stuff in the area.

"From a personal standpoint, this has been a large distraction to say the least," Fresneda told DIR. "But from a business standpoint, thankfully we had a good backup and insurance plan that has allowed us to keep running smoothly. Our U.S. operations have grown 60% in the first half of the year, and our pipeline for the rest of the year looks good."

This week's issue features a story on ReadSoft and the success it's had in the ERP image-enablement market.

HP Kodak

This is an interesting analysis of the rumored HP/Kodak acquisition/merger. It pretty much dismisses it for a variety of reasons-incluidng the fact that Kodak's legacy film business is pretty much akin to Compaq's PC business- and of course, we all know how well that turned out for HP. (On a side note, has there ever been an investigation into that merger? In many ways it reminds me of the current disaster situation in New Orleans. Every seemed to see what was coming - but didn't do anything about it. In fact, in HP's situation, Walter Hewlett I believe seemed to call the whole thing on the nose - but was ignored. Why? If you have an explantion please post!)

Anyhow, the interesting thing about the HP/Kodak story is the discussion - although it is not named as such, of HP's Graphics Communications business, of which is Document Imaging business is now a part. It really just throws some more kudos on that part of the company. If you remember, Kodak Document Imaging really helped lead Kodak's charge - albeit when something as large as Kodak moves, it's not always at light brigade speed - into the digital age.

What would be kind of neat would be taking Kodak's Graphics Communications business and pairing it with HP's imaging stuff. In fact, here's a fairly intriguing archiving and imaigng announcement out of HP today. HP/Kodak would truly make a digital imaging powerhouse - of course, dealing with the dead weight between the two companies may make the merger impossible.

Cheers.

Traveling to Harvey's Capture Conference in Long Island this week. Will try and post from there.

RG

Corporate Weblogs

There is a comapany out there called Traction Software that has added WebDAV controls to its corporate blogging tools and it marketing them as "ECM lite" or an ECM solution for the mid-market company. The company was founded by some SGML experts and the software - which I received a demo of, is pretty neat. Kind of a next-generation collaboration tool, dare I say. It's also of course got all the linking capabilities so popular in Blogs. Depsite Traction's efforts, however, this article proposes that Blogs are still bascially entertainment vehicles. This may hold true for now, but if you look at the history of search, that also started as primarily an entertainment thing. The great thing about consumer-driven technology that gets adopted commerically, is there is very little training needed to ramp up use.

Cheers.

RG

SOX Ramifications

This guy might be a nutjob, but he is one of my favorite columnists. Check out what he has to say about the potential impact of SOX and other content management-based regulations. If any shard of this turns about to be true -- and Cringely did (in a very unpopular move) accurately predict the limited effect of Y2K on the nation's IT infrastructure -- it could further turn the ECM industry on it's ear. Under this scenario, ECM/records management suddenly becomes a company-saving application, and the stakes suddenly get a lot higher.

What do you think?

RG

BroadVision acquired

How nuts were people during the Web boom? Well, I found a Wired Magazine article from June 2000 that listed BroadVision with a market cap of $6.7 billion. And I'm not even sure that was the height of the Web boom. You probably saw the company was recently sold for $45 million. What happened?

"Like a Rocket"

This article is kind of fun to read. It's from the Spet. 17, 1997 issue of DIR, about six months before I took it over. I looked it up after I heard that Captiva was closing its Waltham, MA, offices - which represented the headquarters of recognition specialist Symbus. I believe this was Reynolds' Bish first forms processing-related M&A activity.

This article discusses the FormWare/Symbus merger. Recognition industry guru Arthur Gingrande actually co-founded Symbus but doesn't receive any credit in this particular piece. We do get great stuff however, like Jim Woodruff of Wheb Systems estimating the potential of the forms processing market to be $5 billion. And Reynolds with the great "The market is going to take off like a rocket." There's also something in here from Dan Elam about saying everyone is going to sell out or go public in two years.

Anyhow, it's some pretty fun reading - just please nobody go pulling out any of my old columns...

Cheers.

RG
FROM DIR - Spect. 17, 1997

CONSOLIDA TION BOOSTS FORM PROCESSING GROWTH Recent Deals Only A Start, Analysts Predict

The desire to pool resources and wrest greater market share has led to a spate of mergers and acquisitions in the document capture market. The business dealings of the past month such as the one that created FormWare Corp. through the merger of Park City, Utah-based TextWare Corp. and Symbus Technology Inc. of Waltham, Mass. - are only a start.
"We're on the threshold of the industry starting to congeal," says Herb Schantz, president of Sterling, Va.-based HLS Consulting. "Good little guys are going to bond together to form good big guys."
Analysts and vendors believe there is huge market potential for software that collects data from scanned forms and delivers it to another application.
Creating user-friendly applications is the key, vendors say. Consolidation will give smaller vendors the financial muscle to develop easy-to-use products. "Virtually all the independent market either have plans to be bought or go public within 24 months," says Dan Richmond, Va.-based analyst with IMERGE Consulting."

Small Players, Big Market
Jim Woodruff, vice president of marketing at Wheb Systems, estimates the potential market for forms processing software is $10 billion, even though systems being sold today equal about 5 percent of that - or $500 million.
Such predictions cause TextWare President Reynolds Bish to declare, "The market is about to take off like a rocket."
But Schantz advises the market won't grow without continued consolidation. Merging allows companies to assign engineers to more diverse projects, which results in greater product offerings and the ability to purse more vertical markets.
Look for continued consolidation among companies selling products such as scanners, optical character recognition engines, preprocessing or postprocessing software. Even small system integrators will be active, Schantz says.
For instance, in addition to the TextWare/Symbus merger, the Sterling, Va.-based Star Technologies last month bought the assets and products of the Potomac, Md.-based postprocessing software developer Intrafed (DIR, August 6, p. 8). Last week, Xionics Document Technologies [XION] of Burlington, Mass., bought Seaport Imaging of San Jose, Calif.
"It is a huge market with dozens of players competing in regional markets, Schantz says. "If nothing is happening in a region in a year, [the regional companies] almost dry up."

Matching Strengths
"The combined company has greater resources - people, products and capital - to better execute its business plan and respond to the needs of the marketplace," Bish says. "Historically, forms processing is a lot of little companies and no one has been able to get large enough to get 'critical mass.'"
For example, by expanding its number of executives, a company's officers can focus on areas of expertise. Similarly, the company has doubled its software development arm.
"At TextWare we always focused on providing usable applications as opposed to providing tool kits or technology that requires integration services. Symbus focused on technology," Bish says. "Their technology with our usability focus - you end up with powerful and competitive products in the marketplace."

Of the TextWare/Symbus teaming, Elam notes, "Textware has only recently emerged as a strong enough player to challenge for significant market share, so Symbus will help bolster them ... for more complex systems."
"In a year or so, [TextWare] is probably the only company that has a
realistic chance of going public and doing well," he adds.
The heads of the small companies also are anxious to see a return on their
years of effort, Elam says.
With the exception of a few larger vendors that sell shrink-wrapped, prepackaged systems, most companies bring in less than $10 million a year in revenues, he says.
"Most of these are entrepreneurial companies with guys ready to get their money out," Elam says. Also, larger companies can draw more attention to a brand name - which in turn can give vendors more leverage with system integrators, he says.

Simple Solutions
To grow, companies must focus on creating systems that are easy to install and use.
There are few differences in the performance of recognition
technologies, Bish says. The competitive advantage now lies in added value a firm packages with the recognition technology.
"Forms processing still requires a great deal of customization on an installationto-installation basis," Bish says.
"Over time, we need to not only make the technology more affordable, but focus on making it easier to use, reducing the need for customization. [The market] is not to that point yet."

Focusing On Benefits
Woodruff suggests growing the forms processing market is largely a matter
of promoting the practical benefits of the technology.
"The imaging market is way too technology-centric," he says. Vendors need to go from talking about how many characters a minute their products handle to describing how much money customers can save by using the software. "I expect packaged products to prevail over component approaches," he adds.
A consolidation trend would be good for the forms processing market, Woodruff says. Although he considers San Diego-based Wheb Systems a large business, he agrees many of the players are small. While, bigger companies would attract big clients, a Citibank-sized company would have a hard time doing business with a small, regional operation, he says. Major players will focus on different types of users by creating industry-specific products for markets.
(Reynolds Bish, TextWare, 801/645-9600, http://www.textware.com; Dan Elam, IMERGE Consulting, 804/342-7400; Mary Beth Poggi, Unterberg Harris, 212/5728078; Herb Schantz, HLS Consulting, 703/444-7037; Jim Woodruff, Wheb Systems, 619/586-7885, http://whebsys.com.) 8






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Enterprise Input Management

Captiva’s Digital Mailroom application was probably the first example of the company’s future direction. At the company’s recent Capture ’05 conference, the maturing and growing input management vendor further detailed its efforts at becoming an enterprise aplication players. More on this in our next issue, which should be out early next week.

For subscription info, please contact me at ralphg@documentimagingreport.com

Thx,
RG

SourceCorp

Hope your Independance day celebrations went well. Just saw this piece of news regarding SourceCorp. A bit disturbing as SourceCorp is one of the few pure-imaging service bureau roll-ups from the late 1990s that has had some success. Granted, there have been a few bumps, but nothing like those encountered by competitors ImageMax and Lason. And right now a lot of people are trying to get into the business that SourceCorp is in. Of course, this might mean that somebody big wants to buy them, which may be the reason why all this posturing is going on. Anyways, here's hoping they can pull through this without too much of a mess.

Cheers.

RG

Importance of text-based documents

I’m reading this book called Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond, which provides a detailed explanation on why peoples of Euroasian descent came to dominate the earth and wipe out most of the people indigenous to other lands. A lot of it has to do with more advanced technology.

I got to thinking about this evolution in terms of my own newsletter and skill set and whether or not video communication will kill out text-based communication. I guess, since text is the reason most paper document exists, this conundrum could possibly be applied to the entire document imaging industry at large.

One of the reasons, I always give to people for paper sticking around as long as it has, is inertia. And I guess text-based communication has built up quite a bit of inertia in its thousands of years of use. Diamond points out that literacy has historically been very important to dominant societies. The ability to communicate experiences and provide written analysis is important for repeating successful processes, as well as learning about your enemies. (Which I hope you all consider when it comes time to re-up your subs to DIR.)

Theoretically, video can also be used for this type of important communication and is in some corners. However, it seems to me, in its early incarnations at least, video has been mainly hijacked for entertainment purposes. I still don’t see a lot of thought going into how to make video a more valuable means of important communication—although I guess the 8 million cable channels available today, and even more when Internet video technology ramps up—create some potential. But it still seems the majority of all that broadcasting will focus on entertainment.

And that is why text-based communication continues to live on and is very relevant. It is the basis of most serious communication. And related to this, Google should be applauded for its efforts to put all the text-based information buried in books online, because the majority of World Wide Web content is also developed for entertainment purposes.

Anyways, those are my thoughts for today. As always, feel more than free to comment.

Cheers.

RG

Fujitsu fingerprint ID for scanner access

The possiblity for this type of thing are endless. It's a device Fujitsu has introduced for fingerprint ID to control document scanner access. If a user only scanned a certain type of document, it could potentially be set up to give a whole new meaning to the term "one touch scanning."

Here's the official European press release. Wonder why this hasn't been marketed over hear yet?
RG

More AIIM show

Here's Mike Hurley's (of GreenSquare Consulting) take on the AIIM show. Mike makes some very perceptive comments. My favorite possibly being - "Workflow and BPM continue to defy a coherent trade show demo." A concept I've been arguing for years. EMC in general, in fact, is very hard to demo at a trade show.

As I said previously, on Tuesday, when traffic on the AIIM side seemed dead, the On Demand side looked fairly lively. Both sides, I thought looked good on Wed. But I got to thinking, why was the On Demand side bigger? Big iron, of course. It's a lot more fun to watch something print, scan, and copyu documents at 200 dpi, than it is to here Open Text discuss the advantages of collaboration and records management. I mean, what was the most popular exhibit on the AIIM side? It might have been the 4Digital Books thing that scanned books at an incredible rate using some sort of vacuum page-turning mechanism.

Hyland might have the right idea, by setting up a carnival atmosphere. The fact is trade shows have not adapted well to the Internet age. Somehow we need to merge virtual stuff with these trade shows to get them out of the 1970s mode they are stuck in. I'm not sure how to do it, but we have a lot of bright software people in the industry, can somebody think of someway to make this show more relevant by incoporating technology into the show's presentation?

Let me know. Or let Kerry Gumas of Questex know. Please.

RG