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Cellular Scanner

When you were growing up you probably never imagined that in the "future" everybody would be walking around with a phone to their ear. Nor did you most likely think that this mobile phone would have the ability to do almost everything a computer could do with a fraction of the size. Well, just when you thought that cell phones could do it all, one start-up firm ScanR today announced a new service to process photos taken by camera phones and convert the image into a searchable document for future reference.

Photos taken with a camera phone are processed by an automated system, cleaned up to remove background noise, blurriness and other flaws, converted to the Portable Document Format (PDF) with embedded tags for keyword searching and e-mailed back to the person who sent them. Searching can be done with any desktop search software, like Google Desktop or the search feature in the forthcoming Microsoft Vista operating system.
ScanR is not limited to camera phones.

The company said about a third of its testers opted for digital cameras for their higher resolution though they require the extra step of transferring the images to a PC for emailing. ScanR requires a camera with a minimum resolution of one megapixel. Once you take the photo, you email it to one of two addresses at ScanR, either for documents or whiteboards. The processed photo is then emailed back to you, and anyone else who should get a copy if you specify.