The biggest convenience of having a phone with a camera is in using it as a quick note taker of sorts. Say you're at a book store and see a book title that looks interesting. You're not ready to buy it yet. You want to go back and think about it a bit. Maybe run a few searches at your favorite online bookseller's. Catchup first with your existing reading stack. Or maybe wait for it to appear at your friendly neighbourhood road-side pirated bookseller.
You could whip out your pocketbook and pen and write down the details, except you don't carry either since getting out of school. Perhaps you could commit the title and author to memory, except your memory is not what it used to be and author names and especially book titles are getting stranger by the day. Why not just take a picture of the book cover on you phone and then look at it later?
Same thing goes when you see a notice at a local grocer offering some used furniture for sale. Or you happen on a hoarding for a new apartment block coming up down your road that you think someone you know might be interested in. The easiest thing to do is to take a snap on your phone rightaway.
Used to be, back in the day when a VGA camera on a phone pushed the price up some 300%, that the picture quality rarely allowed this to be any more than a supplement to, or perhaps encouragement for, one's memory. No longer. Most camera phones today offer resolutions close to what you can get with a budget desktop scannner. Mine does, at any rate.
So when I happened upon Qipit, a promising new camera-phone based document scan service, on a list of sites supported by ShoZu, I was instantly interested. I went over to the site and got me an accoutn pronto. I wish I could say the sign up was simple: it was the most protracted and agonising sign-up process I've been thru (save for some Indian sites) in ages. It wanted my phone number, and then it made me pick my phone model (which wasn't listed anyways), and as I was doing all this the form changed all over the place (pick a country and the carrier changes automatically; pick a phone and the country changes; go back and pick a country and everything gets reset to default).
The site seemsed to suggest that I'm allowed only 100 photos to upload. So there must be a premium account. Must be, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out what it was and how much it cost. It is also still not clear to me how the "Publish" feature works. The site talks about it, but the instructions were not clear to me. I had to use a rather round about way to publish the results of my experiment.
I ran the experiment this Sunday morning. I took a couple of pictures of the day's paper (Hindu's Sunday supplement) and uploaded them to Qipit. Here are the pictures and right below them the PDFs that Qipit generated from them.
| Tubingen | Connection | |
|---|---|---|
 |  | |
| PDF |
1 comments:
Conrad from Qipit here, thanks for the post about Qipit. We really appreciate your feedback on our product. Your post gets to the core of why we created the Qipit service.
I would like to answer a few of your questions.
Pricing: You did not find any information on pricing because Qipit is free. There are no set limits on the number of scans you can make from your personal Qipit account.
Storage: We have a storage limitation of 100 documents as an incentive for people to manage there account. You can easily erase older scans or download them to your computer to clear space. Qipit will automatically send a PDF attachment to your email inbox to your verified primary email address. This is a default setting and can be changed by going to My Accounts then Email Settings. Check or uncheck “Send me a PDF copy of my Scan”. Make sure you have verified your email and it is the correct one you want to receive your qipits.
Optical Character Recognition (OCR): Qipit turns camera phones and digital cameras into mobile copy centers, based on patented image processing technologies. It is meant to provide a personal, convenient and portable alternative to bulky and expensive scanners, copy machines and facsimile devices. Qipit does not offer the OCR function because the current state of technology in that industry does not produce results that have enough accuracy for mass market users.
Some of our users use Qipit with a free OCR service called Simple OCR. In order to use Simple OCR you will need the qipit in a jpeg format. Just click the thumbnail in the “My Documents” section, a window will open. Click the larger processed image on the right. It will prompt you to download a jpeg qipit rather than the PDF qipit. Here is a third party Blog post on subject.
Publish or Embed qipits in you blog: On the “My Documents” page, click the link “public”. The link is at the end of the sentence “Make this document public” in the middle section of the page. This will take you to the public view of the page. On the right toward the top, click the “Publish Document” button. This will make your document public so you can share it via URL or use the embed code to place it directly in your blog. The URL and the embed code is located on the right side close to the middle of the screen.
Registration Process: Registering your mobile number with Qipit is optional, but it is necessary for our service to recognize a picture message from a phone, otherwise we would not know what account to place the qipit. In the case of using Shozu, it is not necessary to register your phone, since you already registered it through Shozu. The last page was created to set expectations for users as not all camera phones produce the same quality.
What browser are you using that gave you unstable results in the registration process?
Thanks again for taking the time write about Qipit.
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