C-Pen – OCR Handheld Scanner

04Dec08

With the financial crisis firmly upon us and pressure on the SOHO and SME markets to do ‘more with less’, I think it’s important for us at Janus IT to show clients various technologies that can make their companies more efficient.

Some technologies have been around for quite some time but are not well marketed hence less penetration in the South African market. Take Ubuntu for example, a community developed, Linux-based operating system managed in part (most part?)by Mark Shuttleworth. It’s a fantastic operating system that comes with OpenOffice (a free version of MS Office but with differences and limitations) and quite a few Email applications that compete well feature-for-feature with MS’s popular Outlook.

It’s all about your businesses requirements, getting past the marketing waffel and putting in a solution that fit’s your business need rather than listening to the ‘noise’ in the media. Why buy a Rolls Royce when what you really need is a Getz – particularly in these uncertain economic times.

Many of the technologies I talk about in this blog may not be suited to your business, in fact most probably won’t be. But one or two could be suitable and save your company some hard earned cash.

Today’s gadget is called the C-PEN. Simply a hand-held scanner just larger than a pen with a technology called: Optical Character Recognition (OCR) – a big word for converting text on paper to text that can be saved electronically.

C-Pen

A user simply presses the pen onto the text, say in a magazine, and pulls the pen across the line of text. A tiny camera records the text underneath the pen and using the OCR software, converts the typed words into an electronic format  and inserts these into an electronic document such as a MS Word document. 

 

 

 

It’s a slick little gadget that works well for scanning lines of text but, in my experience not great for scanning articles or paragraphs of text. In the pharmaceutical market it could be used to scan product names or chemical entities that are difficult to spell and therefore error prone if human coders where to capture such data. Names, addresses on forms or invoice information that is paper based with no electronic copy available could easily be captured with this device.

There is quite a nice SDK kit that allows 3rd party applications to be written if your capturing requirements needed to be more specific than just having the text populate a MS Word document. The software does allow you to capture the text into a database field for example simply by highlighting the field. Once done, the C-Pen automatically populates the field highlighted.

Unfortunately these devices are not easily available in South Africa, we had to get ours off ebay. But if you want a demo, just give us a buzz.

Filed under: Uncategorized   |  2 Comments