Okay you road warriors and occasional tradeshow junkies.  You collect literally dozens of business cards every month with personal follow up notes written in the small spaces on the back.  You know who you are.  

So what are you doing with this valuable information?  Tediously typing in the notes and data into your contact database?  Filing away via rubber-banded stacks of cards on your desk?  Keeping them close in your leather portfolio, only to find they've settled to the bottom of your briefcase and discovering them weeks or months later?   There's got to be a better way (there is)!

Kodak offers a variety of document scanners for business-to-business applications.  Earlier this year we launched the KODAK Scan Mate i1120 Scanner.  It can handle single or stacked business cards as well as long forms (8.5" x  34") at speeds up to 20 pages per minute, capturing both the front and back side of the document in one pass through the automatic document feeder.

Ahh, but digitizing your documents is only part of the battle.  Fortunately the scanner comes richly bundled with some very useful software:

Nuance Scansoft PaperPort  11 is great for organizing your documents and photos.  For you road warriors, think receipts, bills, expense reports, letters and contracts.  You can scan into Microsoft Word through the built in OmniPage 15 character recognition software or save as a fully searchable PDF.

Presto!BizCard 5 is the software I'm using for all of my business cards.  You simply run a stack through the KODAK Scan Mate Scanner and the software captures the front and back of the card and  ----this is the best part---- it automatically reads the text data on your card and saves it on within its own contact management database on your hard drive.  No typing required!


Front of card and data automatically captured in BizCard

Back side of card with handwritten notes.There's even a function to rotate the image, if you wrote sideways or upside down.

The software also has a cool function that allows you to click on the address and a Map Quest map shows up.

Now that's not all......you can also synch the business card database from the desktop application directly into your PDA or your email system.  Now you BlackBerry users out there can have your contact info at your fingertips 24 x 7, instead of trapped in rubber-banded stacks on your desk.

It happens everyday. People frantically search their collection of family photos, looking for pictures to share with at milestone events such as birthdays, graduations, weddings, retirements and funerals. A lot of people never find what they are looking for.

While some have organized archives of their photos, such as professional or serious amateur photographers, the vast majority of folks are not quite that organized.

By Kodak's count, there are four to five TRILLION photo prints languishing in shoeboxes and dresser drawers worldwide.

That is a lot of pictures which represent a great business opportunity for retailers.

The business opportunity? Scanning these photo prints to turn them into digital files which can be repurposed into photo books, collages, placed on shirts and mugs and on placard boards for display at the events I noted earlier. Uses are unlimited! In addition, scanning prints and placing the files onto photo CDs and DVDs provide an additional benefit in terms of safeguarding pictures from degradation or loss.

Who can make use of the opportunity? Photo retailers automatically come to mind. How about event-centered businesses like party houses? wedding planners? funeral homes?

Offering a photo scanning service is a natural in terms of providing an additional value-added service to clients that results in a visual display of photos that people can admire during the event and remember well after it.

A photo scanning service doesn't have to be a complicated, technical affair. For example, Kodak offers the s1220 photo scanning system that includes an easy to use desktop scanner complete with image enhancing software.

What has your experience been with photo scanning? Do you have any recommendations to improve it?

At sales training last week in Philly, our channel partners shared their excitement about Capture Pro Software's barcode and zonal OCR data entry features. They also really liked the User Interface customization and ease of setup compared to other capture software products on the market.

One medical software integrator told me that they are going to investigate the API (application program interface) that allows KODAK Capture Pro Software to run 'beneath the covers' to basically image enable their application without having to write the program interface to the scanners. They were very impressed and excited.

Integrators spend a lot of time pulling together functionality to add value to their programs. A key value add is image enabling their application. With Capture Pro Software and the Private API, the application can support scanning and capture of documents and information right from the application. This frees the integrator from having to wrestle the complex work of running the scanners (relatively complicated technical components). It's a win for the integrator, for the end user, and for Kodak