Products We Like: NeatDesk

One of the (many) design challenges we face in the next decade is how (and if) we convert the technology we already have, be it “dumb” electric appliances like toasters and stoves or simple objects like shoes and keys, into data that can be understood by smart machines like computers, mobile phones, etc. Because, frankly, this dumb technology isn’t likely going away. This stuff is installed, and once something is installed, it’s awfully hard to dislodge. Just ask those still stuck using Lotus Notes. But the data these objects produce is important and, until recently, nearly invisible. How much electricity does your refrigerator use during the day? Most likely you have no way of knowing unless you have a brand-new top of the line unit or something like Kill a Watt EZ Electricity Usage Monitor.

One of these legacy technologies is something we don’t even view as a technology anymore: paper. There’s been a lot of talk, both in the past (Malcolm Gladwell, “The Social Life of Paper”) and recently about Paper as a Technology. Alex Soojung-Kim Pang over at The End of Cyberspace just reposted a 2005 Red Herring article Where’s My Paperless Office? about the relationship between the paper and electronic worlds, looking ahead to electronics printed on paper and computers as paper. Until then, there is NeatDesk.

If your desk is anything like mine, it’s simply littered with paper: printouts, receipts, books, bills, sticky notes, business cards, etc. There is a lot of information “locked” onto this paper: everything from phone numbers to calendar appointments to legal documents. No way am I going to put all this into my computer (nor, really, should all of it go into my computer), but for the pieces of information I want to keep, NeatDesk seems to be a good solution. With it, you can do batch scanning of receipts, business cards, and documents, which are then converted to digital format. You can export the data to where it should go: receipts to Excel spreadsheets or tax programs, business cards into Outlook or Address Book, documents into PDF format for storage and searchability.

NeatDesk is definitely going on our wishlist.

via BusinessWeek

This was written by Dan Saffer. Posted on Thursday, November 6, 2008, at 7:52 am. Filed under Products We Like. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Post a comment or leave a trackback.