3D printing may have an image problem. It's sometimes seen as a hobbyist pursuit -- a fun way to build knickknacks from your living room desktop -- but a growing number of companies are giving serious thought to the technology to help get new ideas off the ground.
Telstra has won a $71 million contract with Australia Post to provide 26,000 handheld scanners for a new parcel-tracking service.
Xerox has issued the first software patch intended to fix a problem in some multi-function printers that causes characters to be incorrectly reproduced when scanned.
A software bug that caused some characters to be substituted for others in scans by some Xerox machines is more serious than previously thought.
Xerox will disable a scanner setting in some of its WorkCentre products that can sometimes result in figures being altered in scanned documents.
The space required to store paper documents can be a problem. Digitizing your documents renders them exquisitely portable--you can store an entire library on your e-book reader with ease. And because paper documents can be turned into editable computer documents, they become searchable. Compare typing "Roosevelt" in a search field with spending all day scanning microfiche and old newspapers by eye to research the Square Deal or the New Deal. The digital document is a boon to researchers the world over.
Today the digital camera is ubiquitous, but photos used to be taken by momentarily exposing something called "film" to light. Yes, film--the ode to photo-sensitive chemical reactions that produced all of the pictures made before 1990 or so. Those images were, and quite often still are, transferred to photo paper and pasted into coffee table albums. Sometimes they were processed into transparent 35mm slides and projected onto white screens for everyone's enjoyment (or boredom, depending).
<strong>The Project</strong>: Deploy quick response (QR) codes to the town of Manor, Texas</a> (population 5,800), beginning with public records and expanding to historical sites, municipal buildings and police vehicles. QR codes are a type of bar code that can be read by an application available for download to most camera-equipped cell phones. Users scan the code, launching a webpage where they can learn more about the tagged item.