I have been waiting for a service like this for years.  Qipit takes images that you snap with your mobile phone camera or just a regular digital camera of things like white boards, hand written notes and other documents and converts them to text using OCR, Optical Character Recognition, technology which has evolved very significantly over the last 12 years.

As a heavy mindmapper I often times try to use electronic mind maps instead of a regular white board, but some things are just easier on a white board.  I use mind maps so heavily because they enable me to capture that information very rapidly. 

However with this type of service and application, I have the ability to get a great electronic backup with very little effort.  Not to mention, I can get electronic iteration captures as the white board notes evolve say during one of those meetings where it seems like everyone will step up and drive the dry erase marker over the white board to get a feel for the issues or add to the discussion.

Now with my 1 megapixel camera on my phone, I can only convert images from white boards.

However, these days I always carry a small digital camera with me as well.  With that I can also upload images from my computer to the site and have documents scanned and read via OCR as well or even have hand notes converted.

Or Here’s a great tip if you are Mobile without a WiFi connection or computer

Take the picture with your regular digital camera.  Pull the flash card out of the camera and drop it into your phone or smart phone and add the better quality image as an attachment and send it to Qipit via email!

So in review this is a very cool and did I mention FREEEEE!  service.  It takes your pictures of handwriting from white boards or even from printed documents and uses OCR technology to create a soft copy or it can even publish straight to your blog or website.

Now, I’ve seen a lot of electronic white board tools and applications, even some touch screen surfaces requiring expensive investments in large screen devices and the wiring and connections and tuning and plasma mount to keep it from falling off the wall, etc, etc, etc. 

This is just a simple little solution that is ready to go for almost any user and the setup only takes about a minute.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 5th, 2008 at 10:48 pm and is filed under How To, Improving Technology Series, OCR, mindmapping. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.