Hasta La Gadget!

Here’s a really handy and convenient gadget – a Wi-Fi hand-held scanner (YASHICA HS-420W), currently sold by GEANEE INC. Just turn on the scanner and slide it on whatever you would like to scan. That’s it. Your time is limited? Scanning A4 size paper can be done in 2-12 seconds, depending on image quality and colors. Once you’ve finished sliding the scanner over what you want to scan, forward the data to your personal computer, iPhone/iPad, smart phone or tablet and …

Hammacher Schlemmer has long and storied history of offering up the odd, expensive, and awesome for gadget fans to purchase. The latest product that the company has looks like something right out of a James Bond movie. The product is called The Pen Sized Scanner.

The device is actually a ballpoint pen but it also has an integrated camera that can scan documents. Inside the top of the pen is a high-precision autofocus lens and a five-megapixel sensor. Using the scanner camera you can scan letters, recipes, or any other document.

The scanning is actually more like simply taking a picture of a document in 2048 x 1536 resolution. When the shutter button is pressed halfway down, the pen will throw the red outline around what you’re trying to take an image of that you see in the photograph above. That allows you to be sure that you are getting the entire document you want to scan.

The pen has 1 GB of storage promising to hold up to 1000 scanned pictures in JPEG format. The pen can also be used to capture one-minute voice memos using an integrated microphone. Power for the internal camera comes from a USB cable and the pen can capture up to 300 images after one hour of charging. The Pen Sized Scanner is available now for $124.95.

[via Hammacher]

Pen Sized Scanner lets you play James Bond is written by Shane McGlaun & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

[CES 2013] although the idea of scanning all your paper documents is really enticing, but the actual implementation is often more difficult than expected. I have personally tried a number of solutions, and in the end, I fell back on taking photos with a camera or a smartphone. That may not work for official documents that can be re-printed, but for receipts and business cards, it’s pretty awesome. (more…)

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Skype Updates Windows Client To Integrate With Microsoft Outlook, Asus Teams Up With Leap Motion,

[CES 2013] Something tells me that the personal scanner market, while being an extremely niche one, does have its fair share of champions, and Canon could very well give Doxie a run for its money. For instance, the Canon imageFORMULA P-208 Scan-tini personal scanner has just been introduced to the masses, where it measures a mere 2” wide and is more than capable of handling an interesting variety of documents, including receipts, business cards, photographs, bills and contracts, hitting a maximum stride of 8 pages per minute.

This makes it a snap for you to manage and organize personal documents, regardless of whether you are running a small or mobile office. All documents scanned will be changed to digital information which is easily searched, stored, and shared later. You can also hook it up to the optional WU10 Wireless Adapter & Battery Pack so that it can send scanned documents wirelessly on the spot, playing nice with Windows and Mac environments.

The Canon imageFORMULA P-208 Scan-tini personal scanner is expected to arrive later this month for $229, although different retailers might offer different prices. [Press Release]

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Panasonic HX-WA03 Camcorder Toughs It Out, iBattz BattStation Tough Pro 12,000 mAH Offers Rugged Mobile Power,

This year we got wind of a company by the name of Project Paperless, a group of “patent trolls” whose goal it was to target companies who didn’t have legal means to defend themselves with patent claims for items such as scanning and emailing PDFs. In short, this means that you, as a business, would receive a legal threat from P.P. demanding $1,000 USD per employee for their actual physical use of a scanner device in your office because they own the patent that describes the device’s use. Through the year they’ve been targeted themselves by some rather angry business owners who decided that, “no, we’re not going to freak out and pay you this absurd amount of cash, we’re going to see first if you actually have the rights to request such a sum!”

One of the companies that went to war with Project Paperless was BlueWave, a group whose founder Steven Vicinanza decided to stand up against the so-called “Project Paperless LLC.” He found first that one of the people working with Project Paperless was Steven Hill, a partner at Hill, Kertscher & Wharton, an Atlanta law firm. On the telephone with this man, Vicinanza explains, “He said, if you hook up a scanner and e-mail a PDF document—we have a patent that covers that as a process.”

Vicinanza investigated and found that the initial list of businesses that was being targeted by Project Paperless was lifted directly from the “Atlanta’s Best Workplaces” list published each year by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Speaking with the heads of the companies on that list this year, he found that the same legal threat letter he’d received was being sent to each company, one by one, under a set of “at least eight different shell companies”, each of them with six-letter names like GosNel, FasLan, and AdzPro.

U.S. patents 6,185,590, 6,771,381, 7,477,410 and 7,986,426 were and continue to be asserted against companies of all sizes, many of which have settled and paid up without question throughout the year. BlueWave went to court with Project Paperless as Vicinanza refused to pay any amount of cash to them. Vicinanza did a Prior Art search (that ended up costing him around $5,000 USD) and sent the results to the Project Paperless lawyers and filed a third-party complaint against Xerox, Canon, Hewlett-Packard, and Brother through his lawyer Ann Fort.

None of these scanner makers had to come to court (or even really had a chance to) because two weeks after the third-party complaint was filed, Project Paperless disappeared. The case was dropped, and no settlement was made.

The Hill, Kertscher, and Wharton law firm today is associated most with the Stop Project Paperless campaign, an anonymous effort to make the information about Project Paperless (basically everything above) public. Project Paperless has since dismantled, or so it seems, reconstructing themselves under the holding company MPHJ Technologies.

MPHJ Technologies is a mysterious company whose owners remain anonymous, and letters essentially the same as detailed above continue to be sent out by companies by the name of AccNum, AllLed, AdzPro, CalNeb, ChaPac, FanPar, FasLan, FulNer, GosNel, and HunLos. If you or your company have been targeted by one of these companies or a similar letter, please, contact legal representation rather than immediately paying a flat sum. It’s quite likely you’ll have more than enough legal ground to stand on – stay strong!

[via Ars Technica]

Project Paperless patent trolls continue fear tour with nameless subsidiaries is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.