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April 17, 2006

ScanR: Turn your camera phone into a scanner

Michael Arrington

48 comments »

Oliver Starr at MobileCrunch has a long and excellent writeup on ScanR, a new free service that allows you to take a camera phone picture (or any digital picture) and turn it into a searchable PDF file. If you have a camera phone with at least one megapixel of resolution, ScanR is great for turning things like whiteboard images and paper drawings into something more usable. This is particularly interesting for heavy travellers who do not have a scanner handy.

To use it, you simply take a picture and email it to scanr. They supply you with an enhanced pdf version by email.

The company recently announced a $4.65 million Series A round of funding from Trinity Ventures and Thomvest International.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Monday, April 17th, 2006 at 8:06 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Geoff McQueen

    April 17th, 2006 at 8:25 pm

    That’s outstanding application. Given the difficulties networks have had trying to get people to take up MMS and other wireless photo sending technologies (hoping to mirror the accidental success of SMS to be sure), I wouldn’t be surprised to see all sorts of carriers looking at providing a gateway to this service (and others like it - Flickr already does a similar thing?).

  2. Peter

    April 17th, 2006 at 9:14 pm

    Why pdf? Why not html or gif or a file format that can be manipulated in Photoshop. Unless the text is being recognized and can be copied and pasted from pdf this seems fairly useless.

  3. Michael Arrington

    April 17th, 2006 at 9:17 pm

    Peter, You already have it in a photo format from your camera. This is more for people who don’t have photoshop.

  4. Saul Weiner

    April 17th, 2006 at 9:26 pm

    This is just like clicktoscan. This feels way too niche to be a viable longer term product. How are they going to create a return on the investment to justify almost $5mil? Only solution = sell out.

  5. vucabei

    April 17th, 2006 at 9:57 pm

    This does not OCR the text though right? It just cleans up the original picture?

    I had this same idea a few years ago while I was sitting in class copying notes off a powerpoint the prof was running. Sure would be easier to be able to take a picture of it and have it OCR’d into my laptop.

  6. Matt Browne

    April 17th, 2006 at 10:08 pm

    Awesome product! Now the big question is… how badly will you have to hack the Treo to get it to work?
    Looks like a Great product!

  7. ethocom

    April 17th, 2006 at 10:31 pm

    i do several try i never receive any OCR’ed file … any one have a try him self ?

    THX

  8. Chris Dury

    April 17th, 2006 at 10:45 pm

    scanR’s goal is to turn your paper information into useful digital formats. The problem is well-established–there are 20 trillion pages of information created annually. What’s new is the personal, mobile and networked camera phone. To solve this problem requires expertise in many areas, including image processing, low-resolution OCR, contextual search, and metadata tagging. Whiteboard and document scanning is just the beginning…stay tuned for more.

  9. Blaze

    April 18th, 2006 at 1:23 am

    You can do anything with a PDF. Essentially this will probably be a JPEG within a PDF for most things. It looks like it just cleans it up, un-skews it and makes it more presentable. PDF is a good format and perfect for something you can re-send to clients or colleagues.

    This is a really good idea and looks like it works well. I could use something like this. We once had meetings and made convoluted plans on a whiteboard and always took a picture afterwards with a camera or a phone. Quite interesting someone made a service that can service that particular occurance.

    Good luck with the company I think it will go well for you. There’s a lot of scope with this idea.

  10. Jimmy Thompson

    April 18th, 2006 at 3:39 am

    1) These guys will only be successful if they add RSS feeds to the service to let people access their data from anywhere
    2)It’s pretty clear that the only reason they need that much funding is because it’s not an automated process. They have rooms full of workers photoshoping each image by hand.

  11. Vikram Pant

    April 18th, 2006 at 4:37 am

    “This does not OCR the text though right? It just cleans up the original picture? ”

    Haven’t tried it yet, but stumbled on the site a few weeks ago when I read about the $5m funding.

    The backend has to be fairly simple (not to be offensive to the company but this is stuff I work on daily so when I read what they do I was interested) Companies like Captiva and Documentum (now both EMC) make products that take in images formats and perform Image Enhancements and then OCR to pdf. One can then just pipe the OCR’d text to a database/txt file/email and attach the PDF.

    The next step should be to create a document repository of this information to plug into existing enterprise content mgmt solutions. Kinda of like Xerox and those copy machines that are like swiss army knifes today.

    This also shows an A mgmt team defintely gets funding quickly since most of the startup team seems to be senior execs from large corporations.

  12. Andrew

    April 18th, 2006 at 5:49 am

    Looks very cool, but you must have a 1 mega pixel or higher phone.

  13. BlogReader

    April 18th, 2006 at 7:25 am

    Peter Why pdf? Why not html or gif or a file format that can be manipulated in Photoshop. Unless the text is being recognized and can be copied and pasted from pdf this seems fairly useless.

    Photoshop can’t handle PDF files?

    I suspect they use PDF as then later they can add an OCR component to this and attach it to the PDF, which then acts as an envelope to hold all the data together in one place.

    Plus with PDF you can have more than one scanned in image in one file, so when people take 10 photos of their slides they can get it back in one document.

  14. james

    April 18th, 2006 at 3:05 pm

    So at the moment, rather than just emailing yourself an image from your phone, you send it to them and they do that for you?

    MMS is already unreliable enough for a 3rd party to step in and complicate things.

    And the emailed resolution just isn’t really there for this to be viable with camera phones over MMS.

    anyone who can figure out how to send a mobile picture message from their phone almost certainly can do basic picture editing on their PC.

    another ‘amazing’ web2.oh product.

  15. brandon

    April 18th, 2006 at 4:19 pm

    If people actually bothered to read the site, they would see that scanR does run OCR on the image and embed the text so it is searchable.

  16. rtfmplzkthx

    April 18th, 2006 at 6:06 pm

    Thanks, that was confusing me since searchable should mean OCR, but people were saying it isn’t. :) Since it is OCR I think it’s a great service, especially when it’s free. +1 for bookwarez pirates. I hope it can recognize neat handwriting, then it would be REALLY awesome. The 5mil better go towards developement of new features.

  17. Eric Miles

    April 18th, 2006 at 8:59 pm

    Looks OK, but the images don’t show OCR, I recommend TopOCR 2.0 from TopSoft, which is a program that runs on a PC, just transfer the images from your cell phone to your PC and you can REALLY use your phone as a scanner

  18. Joe Anderson

    April 19th, 2006 at 3:50 am

    Don’t think my phone is high res enough. It’s like 340×480!

  19. seth

    April 19th, 2006 at 7:54 am

    it would be better if an application can be made out of this idea and be put directly into smartphone, that way sensitive documents can stay private.
    i am sure the site must store those documents and make use of them somehow, thats why its a free service.

  20. John

    April 19th, 2006 at 10:52 am

    Or I could just use a scanner…but it’s a neat idea
    http://www.FreeTrialOfferGuide.com

  21. AKIN

    April 29th, 2006 at 1:02 am

    hi. where can i download this program. i didn’t find it anywhere :(. thanx for your help

  22. Mitchell

    May 5th, 2006 at 12:00 am

    Hmmm…I can’t find their email address (05.04.06?). I even tried their service back a few weeks ago.

  23. rudy

    May 6th, 2006 at 9:39 am

    hi. to sign up simply send in an image of a whiteboard to wb@scanr.com, or a document to doc@scanr.com. you can send these either through MMS or email. the service will reply with an activation code to get you up and running. no application download required for the clientless version.

    if you have a Windows Mobile 5 device there is a handset app available at http://www.scanr.com

  24. Fabio1677

    July 6th, 2006 at 2:01 am

    Hi all,
    I try to subscribe Scanr through the message I received just after I sent a Jpeg to doc@scanr.com. I didnt manage to get the url Https://www.scanr.com/act.aspx?c=XXXXX. Does anybody manage to activate his account via the Mobile?
    Thanks for your answer

  25. Mark Howes

    July 12th, 2006 at 12:42 am

    I came across this the other day (www.clicktoscan.com), it’s currently in Beta format, seems to work well, might be worth a look.

    The service does exactly the same as ScanR with the added bonus of doing it all from your mobile phone handset. The image seems to be sharper as well. It’s ideal for when you’re on the move and need to fax or send an important document.

    You can send scans directly to email addresses (no need for a PC) and it even lets you convert pictures taken on a camera phone into .pdf - pretty cool. Also great for getting a copy of notes on a whiteboard.

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