Scan, Copy and Fax with Your Camera Phone

Geoff Sharp has just written about ScanR, a free online service for scanning, copying and faxing documents from photos you take with your phone. Says Geoff,

“At the conclusion of a long facilitation day recently I sat there and copied down the (non electronic) whiteboard and took the flip chart paper back to my desk where I laboriously produced a Word doc that I then emailed to the group for refinement of their ideas and comment. It probably took me 3 hours easy.

If I had known about scanR I would have taken pictures of the whiteboard and the butchers paper and sent those to scanR from my camera phone, in my case a Treo.

Seconds later I would have received an email with copies of my images in PDF format for me to send to the group.”

ScanR converts digital photos of documents, flipcharts and whiteboards into PDFs, re-mastering them in the process so they’re much easier to view and print. To use ScanR, you take a photo with your telephone’s digital camera (or any digital camera), then email or picture-message it to ScanR, which emails it back to you very quickly in pdf format.

Geoff’s post offers a nice comparison of a photographed whiteboard and the ScanR’ed version…the one from ScanR looks much more professional. Even better, since it’s a PDF instead of a graphic image, it’s much smaller file size makes it a far better email attachment.

Here are some ways a mediator, facilitator or trainer might use ScanR:

• Scan whiteboards instead of taking notes during a meeting (particularly useful for diagrams).
• Use whiteboards to share brainstorms from a meeting’s flipcharts.
• Digitize any document easily while on the road (if you’re in your office, you can just fax a document to yourself to accomplish this).
• Save interesting articles from a magazine.
• Fax a contract or other document while on the road (ScanR’s service will do this for you).
• Save business cards in original form for a “virtual Rolodex.”

All of ScanR’s services are currently free. Eventually they’ll offer premium services for a fee while still offering free options.

Copyright © 2007 by Tammy Lenski. All rights reserved.