The business impact of camera phones
Lots of businesses are banning camera phones, it’s really short sighted, the business impact of a camera phone, well integrated into a person’s personal information management workflow will be huge. Microsoft get this and are integrating camera phones into OneNote 2007, complete with OCR capability and Lifehacker recently provided a list of sample uses which is worth checking out. In my case this is how I use my camera phone to take photo’s of:
- books I want to read while browsing around bookshops and then I order them from the library when I get home, or add them to my Amazon wishlist
- whiteboards after or during meetings
- magazine articles or book pages or device serial numbers etc etc, that I want to remember or send to people
- the opening times of all the places I regularly visit
- menu’s
- things in shops I might want to buy, so I can check out their prices on the web when I get home
- where I park my car
- hotels I am staying in
- business cards
- people who I want to remember
- notes that I have written down (and then throw away)
I personally think that using the phones camera as a digital note taker combined with OneNote 2007 will be the killer application for both products.
