A list of possible applications of Shoeboxed's OCR tech to new domains, which we were tasked with as part of our internship.

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Generalize OCR. All paper. Online. One place. Allow easy transfer/syncing to Dropbox. Especially for workers in paperful businesses that want an edge.

Think specifically about college and high school students in need of reducing paper load. Studying old graded assignments. KEEPING TESTS (that'll pretty much always be paper). Auto generate quizzes based on past tests and homeworks (quizzlet). Etc. don't like taking notes on a computer, but you want them organized online? Don't have a tablet? Snapshot and store. Maybe plain text could be OCR'ed into typed text so that everything could be searchable. Or, more easily, it would just be tagged by all the words that were made out with 100% accuracy but left the picture as the main source of interaction. Allow for recognition improvements via manual user correction (just like iphoto's face recognition) Very advanced would be transforming into latex for math notes.

Taking it beyond paper: data. Any data you want to know or remember. Street names with their picture, restaurants with picture, newspaper article, except of a blog or tutorial on the Internet. It's essentially this: user just places data, of any sort, into the app, and then it's analyzed in every way and sorted. Find all text, all recognizable picture elements, keywords, perhaps facial recognition, etc. then, when the user wants to retrieve any information, say, a picture of their dog in a park but they don't know when it was taken, then they can search "dog" + "trees" + "grass" and, if the analysis generated those tags, then the correct photo would come up. If I were reading about jquery, two months ago and I wanted to find out what site I was looking at and I know I snipped a bit of it I found interesting, then I could search "jquery" or "elements"+"HTML" or any other keywords that may have been on that snippet. It's electronic icing all data. We have the virtual space for all that storage, why not use it? Take it 100 steps further, integrate it with your web history, every file on your computer, everything you see in google glass.