In previous generations, turning something ordinary into something valuable was considered magical, even miraculous. It was often called “alchemy” and it usually involved taking a base metal like lead and transforming it into gold. While it held the promise of fantastic riches, the mere rumor about it could also get you burned alive at the stake. Thankfully things have changed. Most enterprising people and companies have given up the dreams of turning lead into gold and turned to more practical pursuits, like turning a great idea into the next billion dollar IPO. The rewards can still be great, though the risk of being burned at the stake have diminished somewhat over the years.
The process of turning document images, essentially scanned pages, into searchable content is a kind of modern day alchemy. It is called Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and companies like Adlib Software are at the leading edge of its development. OCR lets you take low value scanned documents (the lead) and transform them into fully-searchable, reusable valuable content (the gold). You think this is a bit of a stretch, with gold pushing U$1000 per ounce. Maybe it is, but in a world where information is king, the ability to create living, breathing content where before there was only static images must be worth its weight in something.
[Read More]
|
|