Document Imaging Makes Random Notes (Potentially) Valuable

Anyone who's ever worked in an office has been in an office meeting, and anyone who's ever been in an office meeting has doodled something brilliant on a notepad.

Then that notepad goes onto a desk, gets buried under other papers, and eventually thrown into a trash can. That brilliant idea, even if it was only half-brilliant, is lost forever.

Document imaging technology, as it penetrates further and further into the business world, may increase the value of those random notes by storing them and sharing them in the digital world. Over time, the retention of random notes could add up to something within a company.

What else is the blogosphere, after all, except a collection of retained random notes?

Of course, scanning random notes, let alone storing and sharing them, does not make sense if the scanning cannot be done at extremely low cost and decent quality. Optical Character Recognition technology, then, may be the most important factor in making such projects feasible in the real world. When computers can read handwriting, those random notes may finally something.