Digital Documents

Panasonic To Launch World’s First Fully Paperless Fax Machine, But Why?

Rowan Hanna — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 15:35:41 +0000

According to a report on CrunchGear, Panasonic intend to launch the world’s first fully paperless fax machine in Japan on January 23, 2009.

Just like sending emails on a cell phone, users can use the built-in keypad to type messages.

Alternatively, it’s possible to send documents saved in Word or other formats without having to use a PC. All fax messages can be read and forwarded through a built-in screen without having to print them on paper first.

I’m all for any effort that contributes to a paperless office, but this seems a little bit odd to me. It might be the worlds first paperless fax machine, but it certainly isn’t the first product to let you send and receive faxes electronically, without a single piece of paper involved at any stage.

There are in fact many existing online services, that have been around for a decade or more, that let you send and receive faxes electronically.

As an example, for the past 6+ years we’ve been using a service from jConnect that lets you send and receive faxes using your email account. We find the service so useful – a physical fax machine seems very 80’s doesn’t it? Not to mention inefficient – that we’ve previously written about this service on our companies blog.

As you can see, I don’t quite understand why anyone would build a paperless fax machine when there are already better solutions available, but perhaps there is a part of the puzzle that I’m missing?

Update: The paperless fax machine is copping quite a bit of ridicule — as it should — but some of the comments I’m reading along the lines of “who on earth uses a fax machine these days?” seem a little uninformed. Who uses fax machines? Schools, corporations and Government departments to name a few. How many of these institutions let you “email” in your application forms or required documentation? Not many — you can either fax or use mail (the slow kind).

For a lot of people fax-to-fax is dead, but email-to-fax and fax-to-email is alive and kicking. That’s not necessarily the way I want it, but it’s the way things are for now.

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The Makers Of Foxit Reader Enter eBook Reader Race

Rowan Hanna — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 18:37:37 +0000

Foxit Software, famous for their Adobe Reader alternative Foxit Reader, has entered the eBook Reader race with the release of Foxit eSlick. A competively priced (US$229.99 direct, US$259.99 rrp) alternative to the Kindle and Sony Reader, eSlick uses Foxit’s PDF viewer technology to let users read PDFs on the electronic reading device.

All-in-all the specs for the eSlick are quite similar to its competitors. It uses E-ink technology for the display, has a 600 x 800 screen, includes 128MB of RAM, weights 6.4 ounces (180 grams) and measures 7.4 inches x 4.7 inches x 0.4 inches. A single battery charge, which takes between 3-4 hours, should provide you with 8000 pages of continuous reading. It also ships with 2GB of additional storage and has room for expansion via SD cards or USB sticks.

As you might expect from a company that specializes in PDF software, Foxit eSlick uses PDF as its format of choice for displaying eBooks, but that’s not all: it also comes with a free PDF printer driver that lets you convert any printable document to PDF for viewing on the eSlick. In addition, it includes a few features that help with readability: a re-flow mode can be used to re-organize the text in your documents to better fit the screen size, a zoom feature is included that allows you to magnify the page size from 50% to 400% and a control that lets you adjust the text font size in your documents.

The first release of the eSlick does not include any wireless support — although some reports suggest that this feature might be included in the next version — so for now users will have to make use of a USB port to transfer their eBooks to and from the eBook Reader. Of course, this didn’t impede the iPods early success and I doubt it will impede the eSlicks either.

This is an exciting move from Foxit Software and for consumers interested in eBook Reader’s its certainly a case of the more the merrier. Hopefully this new competition will mean that eBook Reader prices will drop even further in 2009.

Starting in January 2009 you will be able to pre-order the device.

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Jon Stewart: What’s Black And White And Completely Over?

Rowan Hanna — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 13:14:07 +0000

As Trevor Cook pointed out today in his Crikey blog, it wasn’t so long ago that people were predicating newspapers would only last another few decades — now of course that predication looks rather generous. On top of all the gloomy talk on blogs and in the media about the decline of newspapers, Jon Stewart has also chipped in with a little humor:

Will the major newspapers, as we currently know them, still exist in two years?

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User Feedback On The Xerox Travel Scanner 100

Rowan Hanna — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 20:42:24 +0000

We covered the Xerox Travel Scanner a couple of months ago, but since we hadn’t actually tried it ourselves yet, we weren’t able any details on how usable it is. Luckily a visitor has been kind enough to share their experience with this compact scanner:

Comment by Floris on November 29, 2008 @ 10:14 am

I bought one of these the other day. It’s a very cute scanner - definitely “laptop” size. But you can get a positive story from the Xerox website so let me tell the other side:

The bundled software is a nightmare to install.
It may be because of virus scanners etc, but it required a couple of reboots and two additional attempts to install, and still it’s not working as documentation suggests. I am not an idiot but I must have spent 3 hours before I had it working and calibrated. Lucky thing I had the day off for Thanksgiving.

Having said that even in its current “impaired” state it does a nice job of importing simple documents and straightening them out. Included OCR and indexing also work well - but I can’t seem to control quality, and the Kofax VRS (Virtual Rescan) which is part of the magic of making it happen keeps complaining that it’s not sure it is legal on my machine.

Other problem is that it’s easy for paper not to go through quite straight (especially receipts etc) in which case OCR has trouble (letters get squished or streeeetched). Additionally it has a little difficulty “taking up” a page which means the feed mechanism will start before the paper is engaged, resulting in the bottom of the page being cut off (it assumes paper is Letter size and if it’s longer it gets cut; so if it starts with a “blank” you lose the bottom). I was able to get around this by changing the time to take up paper from 500 ms to 900 ms (hardly a significant wait but just enough to wiggle the paper just right).

Another (small) issue is the location of the USB cord. It’s coming out of the back of the scanner, and has a big RF suppression “blob” on it (one of those ferrite thingies). When you position the scanner to the right of your laptop, the cable and blob run right through the paper path - and when you run a sheet through, it risks getting caught on the cable. Which, with the iffy feed mechanism, requires a re-scan. A minor inconvenience but still - someone didn’t really pay attention to detail.

I have not really used this scanner “for real” yet - I am sure it will help reduce the clutter of paper significantly once I get used to it - but I have much higher expectations of “plug and play” than was delivered out of the box. But now that I have it working, I’m not going to send it back!

Hope this helps.

Comment by Floris on December 6, 2008 @ 9:05 pm

Update on the above comment…
I discovered an interesting bug in the software. The OneTouch software activates with an icon in the system tray as soon as you plug in the scanner. According to the documentation a left-click on this icon pops up a window that gives you control over the scan quality. I have the Windows bar at the left hand side of my screen, and thus the system tray in the bottom left corner. It turns out that this puts the control window “off screen”. Once I moved the windows bar to the (default) bottom, and the system tray to the bottom right hand corner, things worked MUCH better. I do get a slightly stripey image at higher resolution - maybe need to recalibrate…

Thanks Floris!

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The Eee PC Is Better With XP

Rowan Hanna — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 17:40:25 +0000

I have been an Eee PC owner for almost a year now. For most of that time I used the default Linux operating system, Xandros, before switching to Ubuntu, and then to Windows. What I discovered after making that final switch is that for me personally, Windows makes the Eee PC a lot more usable. You see, I had slipped into the habit of only using the Eee PC as a Kindle-like device for reading e-books, instead of actually using it to do some, you know, work. This wasn’t because I didn’t want to do work on the Eee PC; it was because of the Linux operating system installed on it.

To be clear, I don’t have a problem with Linux, but I do spend most of my time working in a Window environment, so it makes sense to stick with the one platform — and in general it can be a pretty big hassle moving between different platforms. One of the biggest problems I found while moving between platforms was the loss of file metadata.

Xandros uses ReiserFS as its file system, Ubuntu uses ext3 and modern versions of Windows use NTFS. Unfortunately none of these support the storage of certain types of metadata, like author, subject and keywords, in the same way. This means that if you take the time and care to add keywords to all of your documents on Windows, and then move those documents to Linux, you won’t be able to see or use any of the keywords.

Perhaps this isn’t a big deal for most people, but if you’re trying to use metadata as a filing system, it’s pretty annoying.

So, my advice: if you usually work and play in a Windows environment; and the Eee PC is only a secondary/backup machine; and you have no desire to spend hours learning about Linux, then make the right decision from the start and select the XP option when purchasing your Eee PC.

That’s right. Ignore the fluffy little white penguin angel standing on your shoulder, imploring you to do the right thing and choose open-source. You will save yourself a lot of time and potentially a bit of money in some places too.

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Does The New York Times Have 10K Subscribers On Amazon’s Kindle?

Rowan Hanna — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 18:09:13 +0000

The Nieman Journalism Lab is reporting (although unconfirmed at this stage) that there are 10,000 Kindle owners subscribed to the paid electronic edition of The New York Times.

One other important note from that internal New York Times memo my colleague Zach got a hold of: The company reports it has “more than 10,000 paid subscribers” to an electronic edition of the newspaper on Amazon’s Kindle ebook reader.

Very interesting if it’s true. 10,000 isn’t a big number by itself, but if you compare it to the number of rumoured Kindle owners — around 240,000 according to TechCrunch — then it starts to look like a pretty healthy number.

A sign of things to come?

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What Will Seniors Read In A Paperless World?

Rowan Hanna — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 20:09:51 +0000

Will seniors be left behind in a paperless world? Jonathan Zimmerman thinks so. Unfortunately after marking a valid point — that the dwindling number of newspapers is very bad news for the 72% of Americans aged 70 or older who don’t use the Internet — he goes down the path of dismissing reading news on the Internet as being inferior to reading news in a newspaper. It’s a slippery slope when you go down that path because all you’re really doing is expressing your preference for, and comfort with, the status quo.

He redeems himself somewhat by making a nice suggestion to conclude his opinion article:

So I have a modest proposal: As newspapers move to online-only formats, they should also spearhead a nationwide volunteer effort to supply readers for senior citizens. To be sure, thousands of Americans already read the paper to elderly neighbors and family members. But this service will become ever more critical in the coming years, as more and more news outlets shrink or cancel their print editions.

The next time you visit an elderly friend or relative, bring your laptop. You’ll expose her to news events and trends. In exchange, if you pause to listen, she’ll give you the deep wisdom that too often eludes our digitized world.

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Random House To Expand E-Book Offering

Rowan Hanna — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 19:28:13 +0000

Last week Random House announced that pensions would be frozen at current levels for existing employees and future hires would receive no pension amid declining sales and a gloomy forecast for 2009. This week they announced that they are broadening their digital book business by expanding their e-book offerings to include titles by authors such as John Updike and Harlan Coben, as well as an old-time kids favourite the “Magic Treehouse” series, plus thousands more. Sounds like they are getting their house in order? (sorry).

Random House currently publishes just over 8,000 books in electronic format and will expand their catalog by roughly 7,000 additional books. Great news for e-book enthusiasts.

Random House’s vice president for digital operations, Matt Shatz, told AP that e-book sales have increased by triple digit percentage points in 2008, thanks in part to Amazon.com’s Kindle reader. Unfortunately there are not hard figures on just how many e-books are sold each year, but according to AP, e-books are only estimated to make up 1 percent or less of the overall publishing market.

Things can only get better for e-books right?

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Is XPS Catching On?

Rowan Hanna — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 19:05:13 +0000

IS XPS catching on? NiXPS think so, but I’m still a little skeptical. There might be a lot of printer manufacturers adding XPS drivers, but who’s to say that they aren’t simply doing that to make Microsoft happy. On the other hand, Microsoft do seem to have more of a long-term view/goal with XPS, so perhaps we’ll see some more things (and by things I mean evidence of people actually using it) happening over the next couple of years.

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More thoughts on the less-paper office

Karl De Abrew — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 02:25:16 +0000

Well — early-to-mid November has been non-stop discussion in the hotly debated topic of the so-called “paperless office”. Early on, Stephen Partridge — Business Development Manager for Acrobat in the UK fired off the first volley with his blog posting, “Paperless Office”. In this piece, Stephen talked about merits of paper as a “technology” and how it still holds a highly dominant position today — and will continue to do so, and perhaps with no complete elimination. Side note: whilst Stephen says this, I do tend to think it’s a nice seque to introduce Acrobat as it has strong paper-like characteristics…

Rowan Hanna, my compatriot, responded with his own thoughts, primarily centered around the common idea that because electronic paper is able to work more elegantly with electronic information, that when it is affordable, that it will be a serious nail in the firewood-paper coffin.

As for me — well, given I’ve been following this topic for years, I couldn’t help but throw my two-cents worth in as to ways of helping this process along. For the most part, I believe that in order to “free your mind” from the habitual use of paper, you’ve got to take the time … and make the effort — much like the early days of learning a new language. Get rid of your printer, make use of the local internet cafe for when you really do need to print. Don’t buy a new ink cartridge if you have a printer (sorry HP, I’ll still use the scanner part of my multifunction printer, scanner, fax, etc…).

And … budget depending, set yourself up with as many monitors and computers as possible — in as many places as possible. You don’t need to spend up big — you’ll find many old-school computers, monitors, etc… floating around from when people upgraded to their 5,000,000 MHZ, 1024-bit Pentium processors.

But all in all — I agree with Stephen — we’ll end up with a “less-paper” office, rather than a paperless office.

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