The Future of Documents

Every once in a while, a technology comes along, which really change the way we think about technology at large, and pushes the envelope. Google is often behind those disruptive technologies, and Google Wave is no exception.

Google Wave is merging many of the “boundaries” we’ve taken for granted so far. Frontiers between instant messaging and asynchronous messaging; frontiers between Web 2.0, email and traditional document; frontiers between traditional and collaborative realtime editing, even the time frontier…

Replay of “wave” or conversation thread, annotation and highlighting of changes, concurrent online editing, automatic update of blogs or orkut pages, narrow-down by user or paragraph, version control, intelligent spellchecking… There are too many cool features to even scratch the surface here.

Google Wave is as close to the vision of the Future of Documents as it gets – evergreen, social, intelligent. And all of that in any browser, or even on Android phones, using good (not so) old HTML 5.

Watch the video and find out for yourself. It’s long, but it’s well worth the time.

Interesting Wired Article on the Future of Reading book.

The author’s view of the future of reading books resonates strongly with my view of the Future of Documents: in order to move away from paper in many usages, the electronic document needs to provide affordances than the “legacy” format (paper here) does not provide. This includes annotation, but more importantly the capability of allowing these annotations to be shared with some of your colleagues through “Web 2.0″ channels, as is provided by technologies such as WebNotes or reframeit.

As the author concludes: “Taking them digital will unlock their real value: the readers.”

Consolidation is hitting the e-Paper market, too. Prime View International (PVI) just announced their intention to acquire E-Ink for $215 million.

PVI reinforces its position as a vertically-integrated key player in the e-Paper market, as it acquired the e-paper business of Philips Electronics in 2005, and other companies such as Hydis Technologies, a transistor backplane provider components.

Despite a difficult beginning for the year, PVI expects electrophotoretic displays shipments to double over in 2H09. This acquisition is an extension of a four-year partnership, throughout which the two companies produced displays for many devices such as the Sony Reader and the Kindle 2.

The market for e-book devices is expected to explode, from 1.1 million unit in 2008 to 20 million units in 2012, according to iSuppli. This should be supported by major players are also joining that space, as Google announced yesterday that they intend to retail e-books by the end of the year.

Scribd, the largest Web 2.0 document sharing site (which is the basis for many other great technologies like TwitDoc), is trying to leverage its user base to create a revenue-generating business, by opening an Internet store that will offer new sales opportunities for authors and publishers, and will hopefully spawn new document distribution models.

Whereas access to all scribd material was free until now, the publisher started letting book publishers upload their books with commercial links a couple months ago, and will start charging 20% of the transactions performed through them. Prices should be significantly lower than book stores or even online stores, including Amazon.com.

A few authors have already agreed to posting their books directly on Scribd, and should benefit from a much fewer intermediaries and therefore drive much more direct revenue. Although he priced his new book at only $2, Kemble Scott, one of these authors, anticipates he should get $1.60 back for each copy sold. In comparison, a hardcopy of his previous book sold for an average of $15 in stores – but earned him only $1.12.

So is Scribd likely to become the “iTunes of the document”? Unlikely… but at least its current document and user base should allow it to be much more successful than Lulu.com or other such self-publishing sites, and could generate significant competition for Amazon – by creating new electronic, “fair-trade” document and book distribution channels.

Twitter has become a phenomenon for social networking and real-time updates, inventing new information dissemination models. But 140 characters is a serious limitation to the amount of information you can pass around to your followers.

Wouldn’t it be great  to be able to “tweet” full documents in this great Web 2.0 distribution channel?

That’s what TwitDoc is all about – allowing you to upload and share interesting documents or reports in a simple, streamlined way. Just select a document, write a short “tweet” about it, and TwitDoc will upload your document, generate a short url, and post the tweet and the URL on twitter.

TwitDoc was launched earlier this month, is already gaining lots of attention. Although sharing videos, music, or pictures through Twitter channels already existed, TwitDoc takes it to the next level, by letting you post standard Office / OpenOffice, PDF files or images very easily.

It leverages scribd, the excellent online documet sharing application, for storage – only regret, it is apparently not yet possible to tweet directly from Scribd.

To learn more about TwitDoc, try it out, or follow this link for an interesting interview with the TwitDoc creator.

Completely printed RFIDs have been successfully used for the first time in a public project. These “smart labels” were embedded in tickets to a trade show, but also embedded as security measure for documents printed by the german government printing office.

For the first time, these were not just antennas (which are commonly printed) but active devices as well (which were so far contained in a silicon chip that is attached to the printed antenna). Completely printed RFID tags can potentially be produced at a fraction of the cost of silicon-based tags with printed antennas.

This will strongly impact the way we work with paper documents in a future – they will be fully traceable, both in paper and electronic formats. Today, In a Document 2.0 world, paper documents are a break in business processes – sure, OCR or other data such as 2D-barcodes or Dataglyphs can be extracted from documents. However, there are errors, delays and other issues, which make your business process less efficient.

In a Document 3.0 world, RFIDs might be printable by office printers on each document, making it fully traceable, at a negligible cost, and carry a reference to its electronic counterpart. Just like a document in an electronic workflow today, you will be able to track your paper document in its “physical” workflow. Is it on my boss’ desk, awaiting review, or has it been forwarded it to the next person in the review process? (or is it in a trashbin somewhere ?)

One of the important benefits of turning your health records documents into digital is the fact that, if done properly, they can be indexed with metadata (extracted automatically or not) and full-text searchable.

As this interesting CNN article points out, going paperless or at least “Less Paper“ has benefits beyond search and retrieval. Natural Language Processing or “Document Mining“ will allow the automatic “mining” of your documents, and make them fully semantic. This will allow not only to find the medical terms in it contains, but also how they interrelate, to provide an automatic analysis and “understanding” of facts in that document – and that will allow a vastly improved quality of service, the system having analyzed your patient record to provide a more informed diagnosis by your doctor and avoiding potential errors.

It does sound like science fiction – but it’s not that far away, in fact. IBM research is mentioned in the article, but researchers at Xerox and elsewhere are actively exploring the problem of “mining” patient records owing to technologies such as FactSpotter.

The document can be paper and electronic, but it can also come in many other formats, including image, audio and video. These media are as capable of conveying information to other humans, often in a more efficient way than reading.

Audio is an easy one – it’s convenient to listen to a podcast while running, driving, or having other activity. Reading, on the other hand, requires concentration and visual attention. Not to mention that audio can reach visually impaired people.

One way to fight or at least manage information overload is to actually leverage our other senses to ingest information, when one of our senses is saturated. One day we might be able to directly convert documents from their native format into electronic brain waves , but in the meantime it can be more practical to listen to my blog posts rather than read them. And you’ll be able to do that from now on!

Under each post you’ll see a small “listen now” button (see image below).Just click on it and this will open the Odiogo Text To Speech widget. You can listen to the post online, or even better, subscribe to the Future of Documents podcast feed using iTunes, Juice, or other podcast receivers, and listen to them at your own convenience.

Thanks Odiogo for that time-saving cool technology!

Oops, not only did I miss Document Freedom Day, but I also mistakingly erased it this morning, and it is irremediably lost. March 25th was Document Freedom Day, a day devoted to Open Standards for Document Interchange – I blogged on it the next day, but it is lost now.

I strongly encourage you to read more on this initiative on their website.

Anyway, this does not mean, on the contrary, that I am not a supporter of this initiative. If you missed my first post, Read more on it at this URL.

Is there a lesson in there for the Future of Documents? Maybe – you only realize how fragile but also vital your documents are once you run into a problem. The Future of the Document might be on blogs, cloud storage, or they might just be free, but don’t get carried away. Make sure you have contingency plans, content management and versioning in place.

Did you know that on average, your company is spending between 3 and 4% of its revenue producing documents, which represents on average $3,400 per employee? Would saving 30% of these costs be interesting? How about, at the same time, reducing your paper consumption by 30-40% and reducing drastically the energy consumption?

Welcome to Managed Print Services. More information, along with very interesting case studies, can be found in this very good article from the Wall Street Journal. It describes “the new business of printing”: moving from a “print more” business model driven by toner, paper and office device sales, to a “print less and better” model targeting reduction in device and usage, and more responsible use of printing - the “Less Paper” office.

Xerox is leading the way (closely followed by HP) of the Managed Print Services market. This market is growing 36% this year, according to Ed Crowley, president of Photizo Group.

Interested? To get more information on Xerox Office Services, you can check out this little video.

Xerox Office Services quick video

Besides the use case stories of a P&G or a 3M cited in the article, I’d like to hear use case stories from my readers, and what benefits they were able to reap owing to Managed Print Services. Tell me about your own experience!