The Future of Documents

The Xerox acqusition of ACS was formally completed today, making Xerox the leading enterprise for business process and document management.

Great news for the company! From my standpoint it’s also a tremendous opportunity: combining Xerox’s technology innovaion with ACS’ operational excellence will be a unique opportunity to make Document 2.0 technology – and even 3.0 - reach a much larger market, through ACS’s experts around the world, and differentiate the company.

In particular, “Smarter Document Technologies“, which I have been talking about quite a few times (for a good reason because this is my day job) should be very important and relevant. I just hope it will not impact my blogging to much…

Interesting article on  machin readable news, which allows news articles to be “tagged” with relevant semantic information. This service offered by Thomson Reuters is based on a technology called ClearForest, which allows intelligent “tagging” of the content of documents (news articles here).

In this service called NewsScope Direct, analysts can subscribe to live trading information, and can receive a realtime feed based on their interest. They can use this as a signal for instant trading. This is an alternative to high-frequency and algorithmic trading, where the human remains in control of the decisions – a preferred option than letting the computer actually perform the trading, which has raised serious concerns lately.

The Financial Services market is a leader in Document 3.0 adoption, in particular Natural Language Processing and Content Mnig using both pre-formatting of the relevant semantic elements in a document (e.g. XBRL) vs the post-processing of “flat” content and re-generation of that metadata as is the case here.

Except if you’re living in a cage, you must have heard about the iPad by now, probably more than you wanted to actually. I’m sure you’ve read quite a few critics to decide for yourself whether you really need one or just will just one it to look cool

There are many nice features, but it looks less disruptive than the iPhone has been in its time. There are many enthusiasts out there, but also quite a few critics, which raised a few interesting points: no multi-tasking, no camera, no extension slot, no 3G connectivity.

Anyway, it’s a really cool device, but the real question is – will it set the standards for a Document 3.0 era? Probably not. It certainly has a really cool interface, but remains a tablet PC with a LCD display - although with a 10h battery life and less readability in sunlight, it falls a bit short from other e-Readers. On the positive side though, it does come with a solid store (iBook) and native support for ePub, the standard for e-books.

But it could have provided better support for “office” documents. It will support its own iWork format well,  Microsoft Office indirectly, but not ODF. And what about cloud document support? The iPad would be an awesome interface to the cloud – not just for sharing and publishing. I’m almost disappointed Apple has not announced something along these lines along the iPad.

Interesting article on Managed Print Services, with actual cost reduction figures  but also environmental impact of these projects. Slash waste by taming printer chaos describes how P&G engaged Xerox on a Managed Print Services journey, and was able to get very measurable results in less than a year.

P&G is on a path to reduce its total number of printing devices from 45,000 to around 10,000, thus bringing the ratio to 1 device for 15 employees. printing costs been reduced by 27%, but the impact on sustainability is even bigger: paper costs were reduced by 30% and energy by 40%.

And these numbers are not atypical – average cost reduction is actually 30%. For more information on how to gain the same efficiencies in your organization through Xerox Office Services, click below to see a quick video and get more information:

I will be presenting at Utah State University’s Partners in Business IT seminar in Logan, UT today. This looks like a very interesting and diverse crowd, but it sure is a very interesting location – although not such a change from Grenoble, except the 18 hours of travel.

I doubt any of my readers will be there, but in case, please drop by and say hello!

Document 2.0 has many affordances, but also some negative impacts on “older” forms of documents – the survival of the fittest. One of most visible artifacts of that trend has been the “death of the newspaper” or how traditional media are threatened by social technologies, or what I call Document 2.0.

But can the world live without “traditional” documents e.g. newspapers (including online)? This is the subject of an interesting experiment in France. Five French Speaking journalists will be staying in isolated Perigord, only ingesting Web 2.0 feeds (and hopefully Monbazillac and Foie Gras ), trying to reconstruct “real” stories from this new type of journalism – realtime, incremental, but always trustworthy?

And of course, this experiment can be followed on twitter.

Very interesting discussion on Kindle Review about the real need for color on e-books. Is color a really useful feature for e-books?

I’ll let you read through the arguments. I agree that color is not a must have, and other features are much more important to make e-books and e-readers more “usable”. Handwriting, browsing, and other real paper affordances (foldable, size, weigth, etc…) are definitely higher on the list. I however suspect that e-Readers will follow the same path as color printing, and eventually, color will become natural as it becomes inexpensive and good quality. What would be even more cool will be video – leapfrogging paper.

CES was the occasion of quite a few interesting e-Reader announcements – wish I could have gone.

The Skiff e-reader made quite a buzz. Ultra-slim, based on LG’s metal foil technology (less vulnerable than glass), wireless, 11.5 hi-res (1200×1600) touch-screen display… But no real demo as far as I can tell.

Plastic Logic’s QUE  ProReader was finally displayed (see video below). Lower resolution (10.7″ touch screen), wireless, but quite expensive ($649 to 799). It will come out in April with a very good content (QUE store, relying on Barnes and Nobles, Wall Street Journal and other journals). See a demo video below:

Still, it seems to suffer from some of the traditional problems of eInk ePaper, including slow response time, and relative “clunkiness”.

This should be solved with the next generation of e-Readers, such as LG.Philips 14.3″ full color flexible display (only for the Korean market, unfortunately).

New display technologies will also allow video display, such as LiquaVista’s new video ePaper prototype:

or Qualcomm’s MEMS-based technology:

The good thing is, e-Readers are on the one hand approaching the affordances of A4 / Letter pieces of paper, and on the other hand are gaining additional capabilities such as video. They will be able to address applications beyond e-book and magazine reading – e.g. broader office document applications, but I doubt this will really happen in 2010.

Very interesting blog post on using eye gaze tracking to generate a document summary. The eye tracker identifes the words and sentences that the reader’s eyes stare at the longest time, and assigns a score to each sentence. The summary is then just a list of sentences scored in decreasing order.

Document Summarization is not a new application by any means - in particular, extracting key sentences based on some statistical or linguistic analysis of the words in the overall document is relatively commonplace, and even that it is a very primitive form of document summarization: a real summary would involve re-writing, synthetizing, and merging sentences – tasks that only a human can perform well today.

Still, applying new technology to solve an old problem is definitely very interesting. And although some of the assumptions can be challenged (in particular, words or sentences the reader stares the longest at are not necessarily, in my view, the most important), this could have very powerful applications on e-Books or other digital appliances.

This period is very good for all sorts of predictions for the year to come. I will not try to bring deep insights, but let me try to make a guess at some of the things that are likely to alter the Document 2.0 landscape in 2010:

• Documents will start making it into the Cloud. Computing and Storage have been the main cloud applications until now, but document collaboration and editing will become mainstream, as giants like Google or Microsoft get serious about it. I would not be surprised if Adobe or Amazon join the dance. Smaller players like Zoho will have a hard time competing with those giants, though. This will bring very interesting new affordances, making the document social, collaborative and evergreen, with cool concepts such as Google Wave.
• Paper consumption will continue to decrease significantly, this for green, but also financial incentives. After the economic downturn, it will be very difficult, if not impossible, to recover from the sharp decline that we encountered during the 2009 crisis. People have realized and learnt how to do without paper in many tasks where it was not absolutely necessary. Efficiencies will be sought in all processes – whether printing more efficiently (e.g. through Managed Print Services), or re-engineering paper-intensive processes with scanning and automatic document recognition technology.
• e-readers will become ubiquitous for specific usages. Electronic book purchases will become the rule, paperbacks the exception. Nook, Plastic Logic, Sony, iSlate, and many others will bring healthy competition against the overwhelming Kindle and help move that market to a totally new level.  This migration will also start in e-newspapers, although content providers will have to find a comprehensive and overall strategy for delivering content to the various channels – paper, web, mobile, e-reader. e-Readers will not yet enter richer document applications, mainly because of their limited interaction capabilities and speed. These limitations will be addressed by new display technologies or and interest from larger display companies, such as LG, but will not hit the market this year.
• Formats of electronic documents will become increasingly standardized – but we might not be converging towards a single format, jus yet. ODF and OOXML are still fighting it out, and Apple is putting its weight behind Microsoft. Some vertical applications will benefit from custom DTDs, and XML will allow easier extraction from one document to another – unless a few patents take us back 10 years in time…
• Finally, I anticipate we will see more consolidations in the Document Management and Document Process Outsourcing space. There has been many in the last years, who could be next?

This list was quickly put together – I am surely missing obvious ones. Any other input?