Technology is moving fast. Advancements are coming from so many places it is difficult to keep up. The print industry is no different. However, it is not only advancements in our own industry that are moving things ahead, but also advancements in peripheral industries. Besides the Internet, I am starting to think the smart phone may go down in history as one of the greatest technological advancements to date. This goes way beyond simple apps that make my life easier, such as help finding the most affordable parking lot in NYC or accessing every file I own from a device in my pocket no matter where I am or even being able to watch the NCAA basketball tournament while I’m sitting in my car waiting to pick my kids up.
For the last several years we have watched as print manufacturers have looked at ways to integrate with smart phones. HP has probably done one of the best jobs so far, being among the first to allow smart phone users to easily find and print directly to their printers. Other brands have taken similar steps and even pushed farther ahead, integrating their scanning solutions with smart phones. Samsung has done a pretty good job of this and I’m sure there are others as well.
The next step may be the biggest. Smart phones are on the verge of becoming data capture devices or document scanners, both in the traditional and non-traditional sense. In many ways, they already are. By now you have probably seen people and companies use them with a credit card accessory that turns a smart phone into a credit card payment device. But we are now at the point where software and apps exist that allows the smart phone to be reliably used as a data capture device. What impact will this have on print? It has always been somewhat frightening to look at the digitization process and think about what might become of prints as documents stop being printed.
This all kind of hit me when I was at the HP analyst event in Boston in March. I spent some time with HP Flow CM, their cloud-based document management solution. The solution itself was very nice and was similar to solutions we have seen from other vendors such as Microsoft’s SharePoint, Xerox’s DocuShare and other content management and sharing solutions. What really blew me away with Flow CM was its integration with smartphones. Maybe this is common in content management solutions from SharePoint and DocuShare but I haven’t seen it yet so HP’s is the one I’m going to discuss.
Flow CM has an app for smartphones that brings up the device’s camera, which is then used to photograph the document (or even signage, posters, anything with text can be converted into a document). What is impressive is you don’t have to have the document lined up straight; you can photograph it at an angle and the phone still recognizes it as a document, adjusting the skew, etc. The user then hits an upload button in the app and that’s it; the document is now in the cloud and fully accessible. Once uploaded, users can then submit the PDF that was created to an OCR process, which in turn, pulls the data from that document.
This may not seem like a big deal, but it is. If you take a photograph of something with text (like a document for example) using your cell phone or a smartphone you will create a JPEG image – a photographic image. Even converting these JPEG images into PDF images does not typically allow a customer to grab the text from that PDF. Running an OCR process pulls that data from the image and makes the document much more useful (think searchable PDF).
So where am I going with this? Scanning is our world. And as these phones become document scanners, we need to integrate our products with them. Over the next year or so I would expect most of the copier and printer manufacturers to integrate OCR solutions with smartphone apps, tying them into their printers. If your manufacturer does not have anything coming, then find one that does. Smartphones are going to become a major on-ramp to the network and cloud.
Is there money to be made in this? For years we have written that customers should be charged for scans.
Dealers, resellers and the MFP manufacturers would love to adopt this business model, but understandably, nobody wants to be the first.
As an industry we need to understand that when we provide a service customers should expect to pay for it. For some reason we have collectively decided that we should give scans away. Your manufacturers should be developing smart phone apps with a pricing model that will charge for each document scanned.
Don’t think that customers will bite? The OCR scanning app that I am currently using does. ABBYY has an app (FineReader) that I had to pay for. It includes 100 document scans. I have used it quite a bit and for the most part it does work pretty well. It allows me to photograph a document, which is then converted through their OCR process into a Microsoft Word document. I can then send it via email, I can print it, or I can upload it to cloud services from Evernote and Yandex.disk. When I access the document on my laptop, it opens like any other Microsoft Word document.
And just how much is a scan worth? ABBYY’s pricing says it’s as much as about $.07/page. Are you kidding? And you’re giving it away for free!
Beyond the document workflow aspect, let’s be realistic; anything that can be done to encourage printing is good for our industry. I may print less from my laptop than I used to, but I can tell you this, I print more from my phone than I did in the past and the easier it continues to become to print from my phone, the more I will do it. Outfitting smart phones as document scanners could create an unimaginable number of new documents, some of which will be printed. While traditional print volume is shrinking, smart phones may represent a significant opportunity for the print world.
What does it all mean to you? You are not only copier sales people or printer salespeople or MPS salespeople; you are technology experts. Brush up on smart phones. Get yourself one if you don’t have one yet, not for this fact that they are truly useful, but simply so you can stay on top of the technology and what you and more importantly, your customers, can do with it.
Try this app from ABBYY and any others you might find. Think of the applications for your customers and how they could benefit from integrating smart phone scanners into their document mix. Don’t let them go to outside sources for this, because you know what? They will. Drive the process. Make sure your devices are connected to their smart phones (and tablets). And contact your manufacturer to find out what they have coming and how long it will be until they can help you with products and support for the integration of smart phones into document workflow processes.
PS…I wrote most of this using a free dictation app on my smart phone (Nuance’s Dragon Dictation). It was an interesting experience and the document needed a decent amount of editing (and probably still does), but I’d write this way again.
