Photo-translation

Sorry for the second post in a row about ABBYY. Just feel like it today. And - don't worry, though I write about these guys a lot, I don't recieve any comission. They just don't do it.

Do you travel a lot?
On my honeymoon in Roma I've been beta-testing one interesting application - ABBYY FotoTranslate. You install it on your phone, then, walking somewhere in the city, see some inscription you need to translate. Take a picture of it on your phone's camera.
Guess what happens next? FotoTranslate recognizes the text and translate it. Solution for lazy people - but who's not lazy ))


Advice: best results with good camera, horisontal text, on contrasting background.
The application supports 8 popular European languages (English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Russian, Spanish and Ukrainian) and translates words in 30 directions in total.

5,99 Euro
More info

ABBYY Business Card Reader 2.0 for the iPhone

It's simple. You take a photo of business card - and within a second it's in your contacts. All fields recognised. Nice time-saver for a given price.
Becides, I've tried it on my phone - it looks cool and always raise interest around. ;)

The application automatically transfers contact data (names, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, etc.) from business cards directly to the iPhone address book by using the device’s camera and its own text recognition technology.
The program also transfers a postal code, city and country to the designated fields of the address book making the data suitable for further use in search applications and other contact management systems. With the newly added support for Greek, Business Card Reader processes text in 17 languages including multilingual business cards.

Key Features and Benefits

• No additional equipment required. All you need is an iPhone with a built-in camera, such as the iPhone 3GS or iPhone 3G with close-up lens.
• Fast and easy way to add new contacts. All contact information from a business card can be captured in three simple steps.
• High quality data capture and processing. The application uses ABBYY’s award-winning Mobile OCR technology, which quickly and accurately “reads” printed text on images captured with a mobile camera.
• Automatic detection of different data types on business cards. The application intelligently locates different types of contact information on a business card, such as Name, Company/Organization, Job Title, Telephone Numbers (Office, Mobile, Fax), E-mail, and Website.
• Easy-to-use intuitive interface allows you to start using the application right away.

As for the price - it's $9.99
product page

Brain evolution

If you are gamer by nature, but dislike the idea of wasting time - I have a game for you. I've spent 3 month playing it almost daily and it does makes me... maybe not smarter, but improves memory, calculation - and generally, I feel very positive impact.

This application is for mobile and consists of 12 excersizes. Some of them locket at the beginning and opens as you make progress. Here is video that shows how it looks.
I imagine I did not impress you (when my friend said that al his family plays it now I was not impressed) - but try it.



You can find this game on site SPB.com or check mobile store from your phone, they might have better price.

My today's Brain Power is 865, not brillian but not bad =) Beat me

Exchange Server 2010 Free Download

Exchange 2010 is the first product to be introduced as part of the next wave of Microsoft Office-related products. The next wave, which includes Microsoft Office 2010, Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, Microsoft Visio 2010 and Microsoft Project 2010, is designed to give people a consistent experience across devices, making it easier to create and edit documents and collaborate from any location. In addition, to help businesses reduce costs, the next wave will introduce new delivery and licensing models, improve deployment and management options for IT professionals, and provide developers with an expanded platform on which to create applications.
“The line between home and work has blurred, and people want more choice and flexibility in how, where and when they work,” said Chris Capossela, senior vice president of the Information Worker Product Management Group at Microsoft. “With the next wave of Microsoft Office-related products, people will be more productive across the PC, phone and browser, IT professionals can choose to deploy and manage servers on-premises or from the cloud, and developers get more opportunities to build innovative solutions and grow their business.”

Exchange Server 2010 Free Download

The downloadable software is for evaluation purposes only and is not a released product. If you plan to install the software on your primary computer, it is recommended that you back up your existing data prior to installation. Expiration NoticeThis time-limited, free beta version of Microsoft® Exchange Server 2010 will end 360 days after installation.

OCR for iPhone Developers

ABBYY’s OCR technology automatically transforms images of text and documents captured with a camera into editable and searchable text, eliminating the need to input information manually. For example, using a camera phone with an OCR application, business cards, clippings from magazines, books, receipts, ads and other documents can be captured and automatically converted into text, which may then be edited, stored or sent via email or SMS. It can also be used in other mobile and PC applications including notepads, calendars and so on.

“iPhone’s developer community has been growing very rapidly and there are tens of thousands of applications available for this platform worldwide today,” said Katya Solntseva, director of mobile products department at ABBYY. “In order to be competitive, application developers need new, unique features which are truly useful for a broad audience. With ABBYY’s Mobile OCR Engine SDK, developers can create solutions ranging from simple business card reading applications that automatically store the contact information on the mobile phone’s address book, to more complex business tools which support integration with various enterprise solutions such as CRM or ECM. The possibilities for mobile solutions are endless.”

Moreover, because the ABBYY Mobile OCR SDK supports many popular mobile platforms, including Windows® Mobile, Symbian®, Linux®, Android and now iPhone, developers will benefit from using the same OCR technology to create high quality applications for a variety of platforms and devices. This minimizes the developers’ dilemma to use SDKs from different providers for different platforms.

ABBYY Mobile OCR Engine 3.0 was designed with the needs of mobile solution providers in mind, combining strong platform support with powerful technology innovations to optimize software performance and accuracy, while minimizing its footprint on hardware resources. The SDK provides powerful recognition capabilities including intelligent analysis algorithm to ensure accurate and fast OCR processing, advanced capabilities to reproduce the structure of original text and a range of image pre-processing features such as skew correction and image binarization.

ABBYY Mobile OCR SDK recognizes text in 58 languages including Latin, Cyrillic and Greek characters, enabling creation of multilingual solutions. In addition, integrated business card reader dictionaries for 16 languages and their business card formats are also available as part of the SDK.

ABBYY Mobile OCR Engine was recently awarded the Silver Mobile Star from MobileVillage® for the Best Enterprise Software: Data Capture/Collection.

Source: official site

Mobile OCR Engine 3.0 from ABBYY

January, 20th ABBYY announced Android™ Support to Its Mobile OCR Engine 3.0 Software Development Kit.

ABBYY Mobile OCR Engine gives developers powerful tools for creating mobile or other compact applications enhanced with optical character recognition (OCR) and business card recognition (BCR) functions.

ABBYY’s small-footprint OCR technology automatically transforms images of text and documents captured with a digital camera into editable and searchable text, eliminating the need to input information manually. Using the BCR functionality, developers can create mobile applications to transfer data from images of business cards directly to the phone address book. OCR and BCR capabilities can be embedded into any camera-based devices including mobile phones, communicators, PDAs, digital cameras and portable scanners.

In addition to the support for many popular mobile platforms such as Windows® Mobile, Symbian®, LINUX® and others, ABBYY Mobile OCR Engine 3.0 now enables developers to readily add OCR and BCR functions to Android-based applications.

ABBYY Mobile OCR Engine enables developers to extend the capabilities of various mobile devices and applications in many ways. For example, using a camera phone with an OCR application, clippings from magazines, books, receipts, ads and other documents can be captured and automatically converted into text, which can then be edited, stored or sent via email or SMS.

The captured and recognized text can be further used in other mobile and PC applications including notepads, calendars, libraries and so on. Developers can also easily leverage the BCR functions of the new SDK and expand them to a broader use. For instance, they can create solutions that not only capture and export business card information, but also synchronize the data with other contact information management applications on the PC or server.
Designed with the needs of mobile solution providers in mind, ABBYY Mobile OCR Engine 3.0 combines strong platform support with powerful technology innovations to optimize software performance and accuracy, and minimize the use of hardware resources. The SDK provides powerful recognition technology including a new Document Analysis algorithm to ensure more accurate and faster OCR processing, combined with enhanced capability to reproduce the structure of the original text such as columns and paragraphs. It also delivers improved image pre-processing capabilities including skew correction and image binarization, as well as the capability to detect noise on the original image.

To ensure extensive international reach of mobile OCR applications, the SDK recognizes 58 languages with Latin, Cyrillic and Greek characters. In addition, it provides dictionaries created specifically for BCR in 16 languages including newly added Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Norwegian, Portuguese, Swedish and Turkish.

ABBYY Mobile OCR Engine (previously known as ABBYY Mobile OCR SDK) recently won the Silver Mobile Star Award from MobileVillage® for the Best Enterprise Software: Data Capture/Collection. To learn more about the product, visit www.ABBYY.com/mobileOCR .

Software for mass-submittion of press-releases.

I used to think that this software is only useful for search engine optimization. But on the last week a friend of mine that works in the PR department complained that she spend almost a day to post a press-release into one service and it’s a hundred of them left. They cannot afford sending each press-release into distribution service, but manual posting is too laborious.
The software I advised to her is Allsubmitter. They already bought is and started using – looks like they are going to pay it off during one month only.

Let me explain how it works: install Alsubmitter. Then create a project. Insert contact information of your company into it, insert the body of press-release. Then make a search in any search engine – you will easily find a list of services you could submit press-release into. Collect them all in single text file, one URL in a line. Now you can pick you new base and submit your press-releases into it.

What will the software do? It recognizes fields and forms and will do all copypast job for you.
This software is a known leader between submitters. What is important about it is an option of half-manual submitton, because full automated submission leads to poor results.
I am using this software several years for similar purposes. Submitting press-release into 50 resources takes no longer than an hour.

You can download it from here.