There has been a lot of buzz before and after the formal introduction of the iPad. I am not going to repeat any of it here, I am just going to share my educated opinion as to why this device matters to you, me and everybody with a pulse. You simply may not know it yet.
The flop
The iPad is misunderestimated. It is misunderstood because the expectations were set too high by years of anticipation and when we realized this device does not walk on water, the bubble burst. It is underestimated for the same reason. Most of us missed the forest for the tree.
By Daja Phillips
With the recent launch of App2Me, there are many debates about whether or not Ricoh should charge for software widgets that run on the users PCs or mobile devices. According to new research* commissioned by Global Graphics, just over half of large organizations (51 per cent) will deploy more enterprise-wide free software in 2010. Even more astounding is that 76 percent of the large organizations surveyed state that they already use free software across the enterprise. Indeed, over half (54 per cent) of large organizations use more than 10 different free software products. The findings are based on interviews with 400 CIOs from organizations with over 1000 employees across the US (300 CIOs) and the UK (100 CIOs).Free to Fee -Alive and Well in Large Enterprises
"Free software is a critical part of large organizations' IT strategies," says Gary Fry, Chief Executive Officer, Global Graphics.
What does it mean to connect physical objects to digital information? Well, we think it's really cool to point a device (e.g. a cell phone or webcam) at objects (newspapers, documents, signs, posters, etc.) and receive digital information. This type of technology is often referred to as "augmented reality" (AR) and is becoming increasingly possible with today's smart phones (e.g. Mobile Media Search).
Several years back, we started using paper as an interface for viewing and controlling video.
-- Daja Phillips
Ricoh's North American market is changing -quickly. Trends such as the volatility of the job market, frequent down-sizing and the recession are behind a new organizational structure known as the "Shamrock Organization" and vast numbers of highly skilled home-based workers known as homepreneurs. New data indicates that these homepreneurs class will only grow.
Shamrock Organizations Have Emerged, Giving Rise to Homepreneurs
Predicted by the Irish economist, Charles Handy in 1989, the three leaves of the "shamrock" represent the three components that make the organization work:
- The core staff
- A set of contractors on the fringe of the organization
- A significant temporary workforce
Shamrock Organizations Support/Harmonize with the Trend toward Self-Employment
In the "shamrock" organization, a permanent core of managers and employees inside the company is supported by independent contractors and part-time workers. To a large extent, these contractors are homepreneurs.
At the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), there were no less than 10 new eReaders announced. Plastic Logic introduced their highly anticipated Que eReader focused on business users. Entourage was showing their dual-screen reader for education and Skiff, a subsidiary of Hearst, announced a full-page device built using a flexible (non-glass) display. The eReader TechZone at CES was filled with companies offering eReaders.
Activity in the electronic book and eReader space is high. The Kindle is the clear leader and perhaps the main reason behind all the interest in eReaders. While Amazon will not release numbers behind the success of their Kindle, they have announced that "Kindle continues to be the most wished for, the most gifted, and the #1 bestselling product across all product categories on Amazon." (source).
The Consumer Electronics Show was full of new and exciting products, from human-powered bicycle-iPhone-chargers to electric cars. Here are a few technologies that caught my eye:
e-READERS
No doubt that because of Kindle's success, the eReaders are getting a lot of attention this year: CES 2010 reserved a whole section on eReaders. For me, enTourage eDGe DualBook with dual screen was the most impressive of all. Below is a demo video:
DualBook has an ePaper on one side (9.7'' display) and a tablet PC (10.1'' LCD display and 1GHz processor, running Android) on the other side.
Since July I lost 30lbs.
I did not starve myself, I did not run 20mi every day and no, I did not have cosmetic surgery. What I did was experience user centric innovation. I will explain what I mean by that and introduce what is possibly a broader view on innovation at the same time.
User Centric Innovation as Behavioral Change Catalyst
Consider innovation for products or services that interact with end users. What a new product or a new service really does is be a catalyst for a behavioral change in the user. When cars were introduced, they (indeed) altered our behavior when it comes to mobility.
By Daja Phillips
Last month, I wrote about Web Services and Ricoh's New App2Me capability. I mentioned that one of the big trends right now is cloud computing, software as a service and cloud services. In this post I'll expand on these ideas to explore the difference between SaaS (software-as-a-service), cloud computing and traditional software business. I'll also give you an idea of how Ricoh Innovations is experimenting with cloud computing to offer beta-level document/image processing services that can be combined with SaaS offerings or used alone to improve business communication, collaboration and corporate workflows.
Saas - A Definition
Software as a service (SaaS, typically pronounced 'sass') is a model of software deployment whereby a provider licenses an application to customers for use as a service on demand.
No denying that mobile phones are on their way to becoming the most popular computing platforms and information portals. The computation and memory capabilities, battery life, and connection speeds of mobile phones are increasing at a rapid pace. Nevertheless mobile devices still have some limitations that are here to stay for the foreseeable future, such as small display size and limited peripherals for text input. These limitations make searching and browsing information on the mobile phones inconvenient and difficult.
Even though content-based media (Visual and Audio) search have been active research areas for the last 20+ years, these technologies have not been widely adopted outside of a few niche applications.
I am an iPhone fan, I develop applications on it, we bought one for every member of my family and I cannot help but to show people the latest app. With that said I am the first one to say that the iPhone needs competition. Today it has none. Before you start entering flaming comments, please give me a chance to explain my position.
First, the Google announcement.
After an intense weekend of rumors, Google announced officially Monday December 14th 2009 that they will go to market with their own mobile device named Nexus One. Bravo! About darn time, actually!
Ricoh Americas Corporation is launching an exciting new solution that is forward thinking. Just like any new solution or product, generating hype is a challenge. We hope this pre-launch teaser will intrigue the minds of those who watch it.
For more information about App2Me, please see:
When I tell people I worked as a proposer, developer, editor and promoter of JPEG 2000 and the associated standards, I'm often asked what happened to this image compression standard. As we approach the ten year anniversary of JPEG 2000, it's worth looking at that question.
How did JPEG2000 start?
JPEG 2000 started as a submission of a wavelet compression system by Ricoh to the ISO committee that was looking for a new lossless image compressor. While a lower complexity, higher compression system was standardized as JPEG-LS, the features provided by Ricoh's submission spurred commercial interest, and the fact that it used a wavelet led to tremendous interest from the academic community.
We are pleased to announce our beta cloud service for image enhancement, and a whiteboard clean-up web widget that interfaces to this service.
Image Enhancement service takes a digital camera or a mobile phone camera image as an input, cleans the background and removes the unwanted artifacts making images easier to read, share, and print. It also reports the approximate toner savings when users print the enhanced images rather than the original images.
The Image Enhancement service is free and you can try it below by submitting a whiteboard or a document image:
Many thanks to Tim Li, Tani Daisuke, and Daniel G.
Cloud computing for businesses
Businesses are constantly changing and adapting to market forces and new technology, among other things. One of the big trends right now is cloud computing, software as a service and cloud services. According to Gartner Research, cloud computing is a form of outsourcing, by which vendors supply computing services to lots of customers over the Internet. For those of us who want a simple answer it means renting (instead of buying) software services.
Most of the renting is done between one corporation and another, but such renting frequently occurs within a company as well.
Tesseract-OCR
We recently evaluated the Open Source Tesseract-OCR from Google code space. The source code is all licensed with the Apache 2.0 License EXCEPT the tesseractTrainer.py, which is licensed with GPL.We compiled the source code with Linux emulator under Windows and used 1385 document images from UNLV for testing the OCR accuracy. Recognition accuracy was between 89% and 98% for character and word recognition. The Tesseract engine seems to be stable and robust - we did not encounter crashing or any exception errors during our tests. On the Tesseract web site they indicate that the OCR engine was one of the top 3 engines in a 1995 test conducted on the UNLV test set.
When it comes to delivering information about products and services and getting instant customer feedback, the hottest tool out there right now is Twitter. Twitter is the micro-communication service that gives users an opportunity to express their thoughts in 140-character "tweets". It is a big hit in the social media world, and many companies are benefiting from it. In fact, 20 percent of all tweets now contain requests for product information or responses to the requests. In ads, many companies now display the logo of an animated blue bird holding a sign that says follow me.
Dustin Haisler is a CIO of City of Manor in Texas. Because of Dustin’s work in the last three years, City of Manor is recognized as a leader in local government technology. Dustin wrote the following blog entry for Ricoh Innovations sharing the problems his government has around document management and his projects on making his city government more efficient.
Innovative Technologies to Increase Efficiency and Transparency in our Local Government
Dustin Haisler
CIO / Municipal Judge, City of Manor, Texas
dhaisler@cityofmanor.org
There are many challenges that currently plague government agencies across the country, but one of the larger and more expensive problems involves document management. Government agencies are required by law to retain massive amounts of information in multiple formats, for set periods of time.
Comparison of IP based geolocation services for web-based applications
We operate in a global environment. This is particularly true when it comes to web based applications that can be downloaded via the Internet to virtually any web enabled device on the planet. It is best practice to assume that a web based application is a global application from day one. Knowing where your users are then becomes important for a number of reasons that span technical and business choices, for example:
- Where to locate replicated servers to improve QOS based on local adoption numbers
- What language to translate the application into next based on adoption trends per geography
- Where to allocate marketing and PR budget to support growth
And so on.
Zoho.com is a suite of cloud applications competing directly with Google Apps. Zoho is more business application oriented with CRM, project management, reporting, and other online solutions. Zoho Creator competes directly with Google Forms, however, in many ways it is more powerful. Here are a number of videos describing the service.
Log into Zoho Creator and select the “Create New Application” in the upper right. (Limits on the number of applications are part of the Zoho Creator pricing model.) Applications can have a collection of forms. Forms can be created in Zoho Creator, by importing an XLS file, or by using Zoho’s Deluge Scripting language (more on this later).
Selecting to use Zoho’s “from scratch” tools offers a huge number of options for fields.
Google Forms is a service that rides on top of the Google Docs spreadsheet function.This simple, yet powerful, tool enables anybody to create and collate online form data.
To create the form, select “Form” in the Google Docs “New” menu. This launches a special editor for creating forms.
The editor is simple and all the traditional styles of formulaic questions and responses are available. There are a number of templates available for a different look. However, none of the current templates substantially changes the spacing and layout of the questions. (Here and here are people who have improved a little on this.)
The form can be “sent” via email or embedded as an <iFrame …> on a web page or blog.
Ricoh Innovations Inc. is a research lab of Ricoh located in the heart of Silicon Valley. Our mission is to create new technologies and business opportunities for Ricoh, one of the world's leading office automation and solutions company.
We are interested in improving interaction between people and information, widgets&mobile apps that make work life easier, cool mashable technologies, web services, workflow and document processing technologies, e-readers, and more. Here we will be blogging about the newest and greatest technologies that we read about as well as our own beta offerings.
We are very interested in hearing your thoughts and learning what you'd like to read about here.
