Clicktoscan from RealEyes3D

I cant remember which film it was in, but James Bond often had a tiny camera which he used to take pictures of documents in safes that he had broken in to at some bad-man evil-doers home. Well, if you have a camera phone, you can now do the same, and you dont need to wait for the film processing!
One of the VC's at I-Source pinged me the other day to tell me about the beta launch of a new service called Clicktoscan. The service uses some very smart image optimisation technology from portfolio company RealEyes3D, enabling end users to digitise and optimise real-world scriblings, forms or documents in to clear digitised pdf's. For me, the best use of this is capturing the office whiteboard - being able to take a picture of the whiteboard at the end of a workshop and produce a pdf copy of the output, all with a simple snap and send from my mobile phone.
Setting up the service is simple - you need to register at the clicktoscan website, and then any images you send to their email address will be optimised and converted to a pdf which you can download from your account on the website. The service supports both b&w and colour and requires a minimum resolution of 1.3 megapixels.

Jaiku - Rich mobile presence

Jaiku have recently launched a Beta version of their Series 60 presence application, that enables you to see the presence status and location of your contacts. Personally, I'm a fan of presence, provided that it complements existing apps and is not provided as an application in its own right. In this case, Jaiku have used it to pimp up the Series 60 address book but you need your friends to also be using the app to garner any real value from it. It also seems to be quite a resource hungry app with a noticeable impact on battery life and data usage (estimated at 10Mb/month). And once you've installed it, its tricky to remove..

I've also added their blog widget (see right) which links to the phone client showing whether I'm callable or not (not that anyone cares about this though!) still - it works!

Update 24/07 - This app eats more battery than 3G! I'm almost having to recharge my phone twice a day now, and so far it has been impossible to uninstall or remove. Not a happy bunny!

BVP Anti-portfolio

If you want an amusing read for a Friday afternoon, check out the Bessemer Venture Partners Anti-Portfolio, a page detailing all the deals they didn't do, including Ebay, Intel, Apple etc - Doh!