TORC

The smartphone camera offers new revolutionary uses

The smartphone’s camera has opened the way to many new productivity apps.

Some of the more useful examples include:

Shoeboxed
This bills itself as one’s fulltime filing assistant. Its basic feature acts as a business card reader –  extracting the contact details for importation into one’s Address Book and other databases (eg. Salesforce,  Constant Contact, etc.) and, automatically sharing your own contact information with your new contacts. The fully featured offering expands into all other categories of paperwork you might have – extracting the scanned data, human-verifying, categorizing & sorting, and securely organizing in the Shoeboxed.com cloud.

eFax
This allows one to send a captured image from the phone’s camera via fax. It is a subscription service costing €11/month for transmission mode – with the “receiving-only”  option coming free of charge up to a limit. Email attachments or documents stored in the cloud can also be faxed.

Prizmo
This uses optical character recognition (OCR) to convert a print or written image into e-text – useful for grabbing and editing any amount of document or whiteboard content, etc. It requires good lighting, recognises 10 languages and costs $9.99.

Vignature
This is a clever way of getting a document signed through the internet – using a verifiable image of the signer. The image is collected through the signer’s smartphone camera in real time. Not only do you get a verifiable signature, you get an audit trail that shows the time and geographic location where the signing occurred.

Google Translate
This is one of a family of apps (others include PicTranslator & Babelshot), that allow you to take a close-up picture of a piece of text in one language and have it reproduced in a second language. 50 languages can now be handled and an audio read-out is also included.

Magnifying Glass
This enlarges the camera image to make small print more readable – with a zooming capability of up to 6x. Because of the built-in light capability of the smartphone, it is especially useful where the problems of small print are exacerbated by poor lighting as well.

PS. For related Torc articles, please click on the following links:
1. When’s a Smartphone a Gadget
2. Which Brainstorming Apps?
3. Smartphones & Personal Productivity
4. Decision-Making: New iPhone Apps
5. Cloud Computing & Personal Productivity
6. Career Management: New iPhone Apps
7. Interview Tips: New iPhone Apps
8. No More Meetings, Bloody Meetings
9. Working Against The Clock