Using Docscanner with Evernote

I have been looking for a solution to allow easy scanning while travelling.  Here I am talking about things like receipts,  business cards and the odd document. Obviously I do not want to carry a scanner about, so I was looking for an app for my iPhone.  In addition I was looking for specific functionality that allowed me to easily move any scanned document to Evernote.

After a bit of research I have decided on Docscanner and my experience with it so far is great. It provides good accurate scans either as a pdf document or as a jpeg image and will let me save the resulting scan direct to my Evernote account.   I can also directly email a scan to any of my email accounts or also again to my Evernote email address.

I haven't fully explored all the possibilities of this tool, especially the OCR, but already out of the box it has given me  what I need. The integration with Evernote works really well.

Anyone else use this app?

Just started using Evernote? Then I strongly recommend that you get Evernote Essentials. Brett Kelly’s excellent ebook is a great way to get started, and will save you a lot of time. It will quickly get you to the point where you can really start getting the most out of Evernote

The Digital Cloud is back!

After a long hiatus I have decided to start to update The Digital Cloud again.   I have always found  that blogging is a state of mind, a habit perhaps, that once you lose the grove it is very difficult to get back.  When this happens a real effort or a perhaps a regained interest in a specific topic is generally required to get going again. 

Today is is a bit about taking action and getting started again, but I have also become really interested in personal information management, and a lot has happened in the tech world in the last year or so, that make this a very interesting area that is worth discussing more.

One piece of technology that I have been using on and off for a long time is Evernote which has recently come of age as a cross platform information store.  It is an extremely useful tool as it stands but what is really driving its potential is the integration with other tools and technologies that are arriving in the digital world. 

This is going to be the main focus over the next coming months.  It feels good to be back!

Data Visualisation using Google Fusion Tables

Google labs released something called Fusion Tables in June which allows people to import and visualise structured data in various ways.  If this data is public data then the resulting visualisations can be shared as a widget which can be embedded in any website as you would do with video.  (see below) 

Fusion tables are also interesting for their approach to creating online public collaborative databases.  With Fusion tables you can merge data with other tables, open and secure parts of your tables and collaborate on data down to the cell level. An interesting potential approach for a lot organisations especially charities or government bodies. Almost a wikki for structured data.  

Google have also recently added an API to allowing one to update and query your dataset in Fusion Tables programmatically.

Below is an example of a animated visualisation of historical production data for a few countries (from the BP statistical review) which I created in about 5 minutes.  Play around with it and I would be interested to hear anyone's thoughts on how visualisations such as this would be applicable to their industry.

Warning! do not select a country and trails when running the animation - this seems to be too much for my browser  

Google wave shows its potental through BPM

Since the release of Google Wave there has been a lot of talk about the interface and getting over this initial challenge to find the potential value.  As I have said before I think that the biggest value will be in shared document collaboration, but that as the tool matures and people innovate I am sure other uses will appear. 

Well that innovation is already happening. SAP have devloped a prototype Wave extension called Gravity that extends the document collaboration paradigm to collaborative Business Process Modelling (BPM). The video below shows it in action.

You could imagine working in a similar way as a cross domain/company virtual team to develop, improve and agree on work processes related to a Lean Six Sigma initiative or as part of the change management for the introduction of new technology for instance. 

Apart from providing an interesting view of BPM capability using the Wave paradigm of being able to have multiple users contibuting at the same time,  the video also does a good job of showing how people come and go during the course of a project. This highlights the importance and value of the playback feature for helping people get up to speed on ongoing work and discussions but also in helping document decisions. 

From a BPM perspective there is potential for Google Wave to be used to handle any activity that involves collaboration amongst people as part of a formal business process, for which it could maintains the complete record of discussion and decisions.

Already there are some interesting applications of Google Wave appearing. Do you know of any?

What is a digital cloud?

What is a digital cloud? That is an interesting question and one that many people seem to ask themselves judging by the number of people who find this site from a google search for that phrase. 

When I first started this blog 4 years ago I could see that there was an increasing convergence of computing hardware and software fueled by the growing use of the Internet as a platform as well as WiFi and other wireless technologies.  The effects where being seen in the interactions driven by smart phones, online gaming and online productivity and collaboration tools. This was all happening around digital content in the cloud. Hence the name for the blog.

These days the term "Cloud Computing" is probably the most common term applied to providing the ability "to do stuff" on the Internet or in the digital cloud.  The "cloud" term essentially comes from a lack of knowledge of exactly where or how stuff is actually happening, so it is referred to as happening in the cloud. I don't know exactly where my blog is hosted for instance and I certainly don't know where my gmail account sits.  But that doesn't matter as its the service that counts, the fact that it works as advertised.   The computing infrastructure required is someone else's problem and can be accessed when required just like electricity is today.

This video from Common Craft called Cloud Computing in Plain English explains it quite nicely.

What does a digital cloud mean to you?