Somewhere or other (I can’t remember where, unfortunately), I heard about ScanR.com. It provides an interesting service whereby you take a picture of a whiteboard or document (with a phonecam if you like), then email it (or MMS it) to one of ScanR’s email addresses (there are separate addresses for whiteboard and document photos). They then perform some image manipulation voodoo on it and return you a PDF via email. You can see some examples on their site, but they can correct for weird perspective, bad white balance and a host of other photographic blunders. In addition, if you send them a photo of a typewritten document, they do some OCR on it to extract some text.

I tried it today with a whiteboard and was quite impressed with the result. I’m fairly sure that I could probably get a similar result if I spent hours messing about in Photoshop, but this is just much easier (and free!). I can see myself using it a lot for whiteboards in particular, to capture ideas in a very clean form before I accidentally erase them. I might even use it in the library when I remember—too late—that my photocopy card has no credits left on it.