Monday, September 15, 2014

Mobile Capture and OCR

I have been to a few conferences lately, and it seems the focus on mobile OCR solutions is waning.  I am not sure why, but I have some theories.  Below are some of my thoughts:


  • The Cloud - First off, OCR in the cloud can be expensive.  With the transfer of documents back and forth, you are paying for bandwidth, storage and processor cycles.  
  • Security - You can say what you like, but there are still serious security concerns with all things cloud.  Just look at the recent iCloud breach.  Put something up in the cloud, and who know who will access your data.
  • Lack of Consumer Awareness - you general, run of the mill consumer really has no concept of what OCR can do for them.  It would take massive marketing efforts to eucate the consumer populous.
  • Businesses Still Like On Premise - let's face it, there are numerous on premise OCR solutions that can do the conversions quickly and without much expense.
With all of that said, there are some interesting new companies focused on online capture and OCR solutions.   Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Apps are now driving some great business processes.