Mind the Gap - more cool technology to make life easier

Mind the Gap
New Programs Promise to Bridge
The Analog-to-Digital Divide

By Jeremy Wagstaff, Wall Street Journal
September 7, 2007
JAKARTA, Indonesia — If you’ve ever lost a receipt, tried to remember an important idea you had while driving, or pondered why people rattle off the vital information — their names and numbers — in voicemails so quickly you have to listen to them four times, then you’ve encountered something I’ll pompously call the Analog To Digital Gap. It’s when we can’t move something from atoms to bits as easily as we’d like.

And for some reason it’s still with us. We seem to have spent most of the past few years fiddling with what’s already digital. Web 2.0, the cutting edge of the online revolution, is mostly about sharing stuff that’s already in bit form: photos, videos, music, blogs — all that kind of thing. Very little effort, from what I can see, has been spent on actually getting stuff into that form.

True, there are exceptions. Who uses a camera with film anymore? Most of our snaps are digital, making it relatively easy to store, share and edit them. And a large proportion of music is now digital, meaning we can listen to it on our iPods. But neither media is particularly kind in helping us move our old analog photos, videos and music to a digital format. Services and products do exist, but they’re either expensive or time-consuming or both.

Then there’s the world we move around in. Despite our best efforts — bar codes, cashless transactions via cards or phones with special chips in them — much of what is around us is defiantly undigital. So how do we digitize it?

Take this situation, for example: You’re on a trip and entertaining a client. You pay the bill and you know that by the time you get back home you’ll have lost the receipt, or forgotten to claim the expense, or both. A classic analog/digital gap. But if you were prepared, you could flatten the receipt on the table, snap it from above with your camera phone, then upload it to the Internet. A few moments later it would arrive in your email Inbox as both an Adobe Acrobat PDF file you could print out and a text version you could paste into your expenses spreadsheet.

This would be done courtesy of a free service called scanR (scanr.com1) that scans and converts an image into something you can use: a business card, say, into a format you can drop into Microsoft Outlook; a whiteboard presentation into an image you can save and print out later; or a page from a magazine you found in a doctor’s waiting room into text you can email to a friend. As well as English, the software is also available in Chinese and Japanese. As California-based scanR chief executive Rudy Ruano puts it, it’s simply about “moving the physical form from one place to another.”

I like this kind of thing because it’s practical. And it’s simple. It isn’t perfect, of course: Sometimes it fails to recognize characters correctly. But it solves a real problem: It turns the stuff we have to deal with in our daily lives — receipts, business cards, faxes, jottings on the back of napkins — into something digital. Once it’s digital, we can do more or less what we like with it.

There are other ways of doing the same thing. Nokia is one of a number of companies that has toyed with a digital pen that writes normally on paper but then also stores a digital record of the writing, allowing the user to transfer it to a computer, then edit and share it. In Nokia’s case, its digital pen — the SU-27W — not only lets you share your doodlings with others via your cellphone as images, but also will do its best to transcribe handwriting to text.

The technology is a few years old — it’s basically the same as the Logitech io2 pen, which I reviewed last year (”Mightier than the keyboard2,” March 10, 2006). What is different here is how Nokia uses Bluetooth, the technology that lets devices communicate with each other wirelessly, to remove another step: connecting the pen to its computer cradle. By transferring writing wirelessly to a computer or another Bluetooth device, the Nokia pen further narrows the Analog To Digital Gap.

The other analog conundrum is voice. Converting something we say into something our computers and other devices can work with has always been hard. Trust me, I’m a journalist, and I mourn all the interviews and chats I’ve had that can’t be stored in a way I can easily search and use. Even if I record those interviews digitally, there’s still no easy way to comb through them, short of transcribing them. Which is, for me, a living hell.

A British company called SpinVox Ltd. reckons it has the answer: Phone in what you’ve got to say, whether it’s voicemail for someone, a blog entry or a memo that you want to store in your email inbox, and it will appear as transcribed text wherever you want it.

With SpinVox all you see is the resulting text, after it has passed through a combination of voice recognition programs and, when those can’t decipher a word, a human. It usually only takes a couple of minutes to go from your mouth to your mailbox (or blog, or whatever). Even your grandmother could do it. “It’s removing the tangle of the mess of these technologies down to just making the phone call,” says co-founder Daniel Doulton, whose grandmother has indeed blogged from a rotary-dial phone.

I was impressed with SpinVox: My tests came out pretty accurately. They even got Denpasar, the Balinese capital, right. The service, which currently is free, is available in Europe and North America for now, but will be launched soon in Australia and New Zealand, and in Asia thereafter.

None of these products or services is going to transform your life. But they each do a great job of nibbling away at the Gap.