Nick May wrote:
>
> <irrelevant>I read somewhere that the fax machine was invented in
> Japan largely because of the difficulty of input and transmission
> of kanji via Telex.</irrelevant>
That's an interesting comment and not irrelevant in the slightest...
I always enjoy chiding my fellow Japanese geeks with Nicholas
Negroponte's view of the FAX whenever they flash the latest bit of
FAX technology in front of me... but I think you're right... FAX,
much to NTT's joy, is still a very dominate technology in Japan.
I ran across one company who consolidated real-estate listings into an
entirely FAX database... The last I heard (and this was several years
ago) they were *still* trying to take their operation to the Internet
and not having much success. The magnitude of the contract that they
owned via the use of this legacy technology was astounding...
If you want to understand the cultural difference, ask yourself this
question:
How many Internet startups in the US got their capital by pitching
ideas that involved bridging FAX to the Internet?
If you're an idiot savant and actually have an answer, then ask:
Where are they today? (a convenient little ad hominem catch all)
Ok, a quick plug for one that recently getting a lot of press recently:
http://www.paperlesspobox.com/servlet/HomeServlet
If you spend any time at all in the average japanese office (bucho's
desk at the head of 4 to 16 workers, exercise in the morning, go home
now music plays at 5:00pm for all the non-salried staff and all that
jazz), you know the pack-rat, space consuming nature of the average
non-paperless office in Japan. If you're going to use technology to
solve business problems in Japan, you're going to run into the brick
FAX machine wall very quickly.
I'd say that OCR at the FAX machine (both inbound and outbound) would
be an interesting attempt... (obviously, someone out there has done it,
but has anyone done it in a data warehousing manner on centralized,
network accessible file stores (and I'm not just talking about FAX
image storage)?... Ok, I'm sure it been done too... but what about
the mobile, company keitai using part of your work force?).
As someone who's recently scanned a +5" stack of documents to reduce
his logistical airlift/backlift requirements, I can tell you there's
a place for this in Japan (and everywhere else for that matter).
Now, to bring this back on topic for the post/list...
I ran across an interesting device from panasonic... a USB scanner
about half the size of a pack of cigarettes that uses autostiching to
piece together a document from uncoordinated hand waves over the
document... I have often wondered why HP's Capshare never did better
in the Japanese market; after all, it was basically a portable FAX
machine... still, I see no reason why your average handset/PDA
couldn't incorporate a low resolution (300dpi) scanner down one side
of the phone... all someone has to do is figure out how to use it
to measure some 99th percentile biometrics and there will be not
no reason not to include it in the device.
Display technology seems to be a significant part of the problem...
even the Capshare had almost a Palm's worth of screen real-estate.
FAX/OCR on your keitai? How are you going to read it to verify
correctness? Seems pretty dangerous, esp. when you start playing
fun mix/match games with Kanji are in the pop-up list.
With regard to M. Turner's original observation, if you do the math,
I believe you'll find that the cameras that are starting to appear
in handsets would need to have resolution an order of magnitude (or
more) better to be able to provide images of text documents suitable
for OCR purposes (esp. considering how tiny some of the office type
'A's write... not to mention the fact that most cameras these days
have lenses with artifacts that are mutually exclusive to applications
such as OCR). All this harks back to those spy cameras that had
fixed focal lengths and a bit of retractable string to make sure the
users got it in exactly the right position (similar specs... super
small, suitable for character recognition, ultra high resolution film,
unobtrusive, easy to use, etc.)
More interesting to me would be the digitization of analog input at
the input device (those bluetooth OCR pen PDAs that we're all supposed
to have in our shirt packets by early next year). Of course these
will be doomed to failure if they required special paper and/or can
not be attached to your favorite writing instrument. Still, there
might be enough resolution in consumer cameras (and maybe the pen
devices) to capture and process bar codes... otherwise Nick is right;
pictures and strong brand recognition will be the utilitarian limit.
Received on Sun Jan 6 22:49:59 2002