If you've watched late night television lately you’ve probably seen the commercial for the NeatDesk® scanner. This digital filing system is an improvement on the traditional scanner because it has multiple trays that accommodate sheets of different sizes. The usability has certainly been improved because the sheets are easily fed through the machine like in a shredder.
The premise of the product is to reduce clutter by digitalizing documents that can be saved on your computer. Although the product serves its purpose it does not provide a solution to losing documents because as we all know digital files can easily be erased. I wonder if the creators have included some kind of protection against file loss. If anything the safest way to prevent loss would be to have a backup on a flash drive or external drive. But the latter can crash or be misplaced, leading us back to the original predicament – yet another wicked problem.
Your concern about file loss is a reasonable one. If I was the creator of the NeatDesk, this would be a good time to think about convergence and the whole experience of using the product. Perhaps I could partner with multiple companies to create an ecosystem of portable, perpetual digital documentation.
ReplyDeleteFor example, I could partner with SanDisk to include USB sticks with the NeatDesk for on-site backup. Then I could partner with DropBox to provide off-site backup. What's more, DropBox provides anywhere-anytime access and synchronization among multiple PCs. Now the NeatDesk is the central part of a "virtual, paperless office" ecosystem that an entire small office can leverage.
I understand the premise of the product but I wonder how much this product really changes the business world. It seems like it would take time away from my work projects for such a little reward. I feel like this product is another fancy toy for the office, but I do not have one so I could be wrong.
ReplyDeleteAs a stand alone device, I think Nicole is right, it smacks of early adopters and irrelevance to larger addressable audiences. However, recast as a node in a larger ecosystem as Matt has suggested makes the technology more interesting. Mostly because it begins to recede as 'technology' and becomes a point for feeding my personal or small system data repository. How might this pair with coloft senarios?
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