Steve Wozniak Invests In Robot-Powered Paper-Digitizing Startup (businessinsider.com) 54
Steve Wozniak -- along with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byer -- have invested in an automated paper-digitization company named Ripcord, which formally launched on Thursday. An anonymous reader quotes VentureBeat:
Based in Hayward, California, Ripcord has machines that can scan, index, and categorize paper records to make them searchable through companies' existing systems, via the cloud... Upon receipt, Ripcord unboxes the files and passes them to its machines, which scan, upload, and convert the content into searchable PDFs. Ripcord says that the conversion and classification process is around 80 percent automated and covers handling, the removal of fasteners (e.g. staples), and scanning.
"It sounds silly at first, but a really big part of the reason why this has never been done before are staples," explains Business Insider. "Existing scanner systems require humans to pull staples, separate three-ring binders, unclip paper clips, and occasionally even unstrip duct tape before they can go through the system -- otherwise they jam up the works."
"Our robots work their magic," explains Ripcord's web site. They're charging .004 cents per page -- for every month that it's stored in the cloud.
"It sounds silly at first, but a really big part of the reason why this has never been done before are staples," explains Business Insider. "Existing scanner systems require humans to pull staples, separate three-ring binders, unclip paper clips, and occasionally even unstrip duct tape before they can go through the system -- otherwise they jam up the works."
"Our robots work their magic," explains Ripcord's web site. They're charging .004 cents per page -- for every month that it's stored in the cloud.
No, thank you (Score:1)
Having my records live in the "cloud"[1] is pretty much the last thing on Earth that I would want, from a security and privacy standpoint.
[1] As someone once said, "There is no cloud; it's just someone else's computer."
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The summary says ".004 cents per page".
Now, is this cost another case of VerizonMath? [blogspot.ca] Do they mean really 0.004 cents or do they mean $0.004? If it's the former then it means 0.004 of $0.01, or $0.00004 per page, per month. That's $0.0072 per page for 15 years, not $0.72.
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So the summary was written by someone using VerizonMath.
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It depends on if you can retrieve your content and store it locally and stop paying a per-month charge.
The idea that someone can do the grunt work cheaply appeals. As GP said though, the idea that it's stored on someone else's server very much does not appeal.
There also may be problems with a failure to have the actual original in some cases. I could see that being an issue in contracts if there's a dispute, the other party can produce a paper copy that appears entirely genuine but all you have is an elec
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If you can view it, you can download it. Unless they demand the business use some kind of special program to view their own documents.
In which case they might as well sell the robot tech. No one is going to take their cloud service.
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Some stuff needs to be stored for 15 years. At 0.004 a month per page, that's $0.72 per page. At that price, it's WAY cheaper to have someone remove the staples and scan it in locally, and not be dependent on them staying in business, not getting hacked, or raising prices.
WAY cheaper?
Are you considering the total annual cost of servers, redundant storage, backup hardware, software and media, software licenses, real estate costs/taxes, and IT staff to run it all? High-speed scanner hardware and minimum-wage staple pullers? Multiply all that by fifteen to obtain the total cost of long-term document storage and protection?
With costs per page, it would all depend on volume when looking at what's cheaper. 100,000 pages would cost you less than $75K for fifteen years. A single
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Are you considering the total annual cost of servers, redundant storage, backup hardware, software and media, software licenses, real estate costs/taxes, and IT staff to run it all?
Having all those things done by some external party doesn't magically reduce the cost.
A single competent SysAdmin (fully loaded) would cost more than that for one year, and you've not even spent money on hardware and software yet.
Apparently, you don't need a single competent sysadmin to maintain 100,000 scanned pages, otherwise they could never offer it so cheap.
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Are you considering the total annual cost of servers, redundant storage, backup hardware, software and media, software licenses, real estate costs/taxes, and IT staff to run it all?
Having all those things done by some external party doesn't magically reduce the cost.
Uh, yeah, it kind of does. If your company has a requirement to electronically warehouse documents and really has no other need for IT services, you either bear the burden of scanning, storing, and making it available in electronic format yourself, or you pay someone else to do all that.
A single competent SysAdmin (fully loaded) would cost more than that for one year, and you've not even spent money on hardware and software yet.
Apparently, you don't need a single competent sysadmin to maintain 100,000 scanned pages, otherwise they could never offer it so cheap.
Again, volume matters. Their SysAdmin costs are not only shared across hundreds or thousands of customers managing millions or billions of pages, but their SysAdmin costs are also likely sourced from the most inexpensive r
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Most companies big enough to have 100,000 pieces of paperwork already have a competent SysAdmin of their own, who will also be responsible for the maintenance of all their current electronic documents. In that case, we're not talking about setting up an entire infrastructure for the scanned documents, rather we just use the infrastructure that's already there, and add the scanned paperwork to the existing electronic documentation. Maybe they'll have to buy an extra disk, and add it to the backup routine.
but their SysAdmin costs are also likely sourced from the most inexpensive resources available on the planet.
Wel
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> If your company has a requirement to electronically warehouse documents and really has no other need for IT services
What kind of company would that be that has no need for IT services? No need to store any data at all? And if you are legally required to warehouse documents, I doubt they accept cloud storage that could go up in a puff any moment.
Honestly, the first company profile that came to mind that has a requirement for records retention while usually not retaining full-time IT services is a legal firm. I've seen my fair share of small firms fit this profile quite well.
And if you are legally required to warehouse documents, I doubt they accept cloud storage that could go up in a puff any moment.
As far as documents going "up in a puff", that's kind of exactly what happens in the traditional scenario of an office building burning to the ground overnight. If you didn't hire a competent SysAdmin to maintain servers, backups, and tape media that would have been shipped of
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I agree. They would have a really great deal if they could put the whole thing in, e.g., a shipping container, and transport one or more of them to your site and convert your paper records.
This would open up the customer base to include such options as government (IRS, Health, DoD, CIA, etc.) and defense contractors who handle protected and classified material which cannot be sent/stored "in the cloud" as well as sensible and responsible organizations who won't.
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So many questions (Score:3)
1) Can your robots read bad handwriting? Because a lot of paper documents have handwritten info.
2) What kind of security/privacy guarantees can your offer, and do you have adequate insurance to cover claims from a major hack or data breach?
3) Can I offload my documents from your cloud service to a different service or to my own servers?
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Is OCR that good yet? I understand that PDF can store the image, along with the text metadata for searching. So the text can be improved while retaining visual fidelity for when OCR improves. Or when an intern deciphers the handwriting.
But as you say, I would want to do a lot of cleanup that relies on local availability, not cloud nonsense.
And mid trial when AWS dies due to a typo, I'm going to go apeshit and your design is defective. So they have piles of disclaimers which automatically make this a subopti
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Well, this is a photocopier that I'm talking about so obviously the quality of the OCR is not going to be as good as it could be in a dedicated machine, but what we get out of scanning documents that were entirely printed is arguably shit. When we process inventory to move it from place to place we have to do asset tracking paperwork and that means logging the asset tag as issued by the property control department, the serial number as issued by the manufacturer of the device, a description of the item, an
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Robot Arms (Not the Hotel) Take Men's Jobs (Score:1)
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I thought it was for penis grabbing, at least that's what I saw on this long-running documentary about the initial formation of the Universe that's been on TV every week.
The science on this documentary is very weak, they seem to go for several episodes between discussing actual science and even then they only hint at it.
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Cost (Score:2)
Scanning & handling paper - 0.004 cents per page
All your private data on someone else's server - priceless.
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Scanning & handling paper - 0.004 cents per page
Per month. A million pages will be $4,000 per month, or $52,000 per year at this introductory rate.
The risk seems great that a corporate manager will fall for the temptation of saving the company a chunk of reoccurring expenses, and at the same time erasing its historical records.
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http://verizonmath.blogspot.ca... [blogspot.ca]
$40 per month for one million pages?
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Then the author of the summary is as bad as Verizon.
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Of course. No one ever likes to do the long-term math.
I'm contending with a group wanting to move our main server facility and ISP connection to an offsite hosting location and to just make us one of the links on the private WAN like any other facility, even though we have the generator and environmental already paid-for. They were really gung-ho until a final tally on the costs came back from the provider and somehow some price doubled or was otherwise misinterpreted from the initial talks, and it appear
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Woz' involvement here seems to be rather less than what the clickbait title indicates. He's put money in an angel company who decided to invest in this company..
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Yeah, but he would only manage a few staples per hour. He surely must have a whole army of oompa-loompas pulling staples in the background, and driving around on Name Brand(TM) personal mobility devices.
Longevity (Score:2)
They're charging .004 cents per page -- for every month that it's stored in the cloud.
And that's why I am worried about approaches like this. Documents that were maturing for posterity in a basement are now subject to a rental fee, and once a bean counter decides not to pay that, they're gone.
That may be okay for documents that aren't of any value to future document diggers, but I fear that much of future history will be lost if subject to a rent troll.
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$0.004 per page, per month
4.8 cents per page per year, or $48/year per 1,000 pages. A banker's box holds 5,000 pages, so $240 a year per box of documents just for storage. That adds up pretty quickly for a large business. You could probably store the physical boxes cheaper and more securely (and you probably have to keep the physical copies anyways) at a place that specializes in secure document storage.
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Physical storage costs money too. Less money.
Nope (Score:2)
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Some businesses might...but with HIPAA laws, banking laws and lawyers, the security of "in the cloud" no matter how secure, might put some people off on this.
It doesn't matter how secure it is, it matters how secure the auditors say it is. A startup will do quite poorly by this measure, while the companies with years of good lobbying will have arranged things so that it's fine.
Big deal about removing staples (Score:2)
The more elegant solution is to just shred the papers before digitizing them.