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Steve Wozniak Invests In Robot-Powered Paper-Digitizing Startup (businessinsider.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the investing-in-automation dept.

Steve Wozniak -- along with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byer -- have invested in an automated paper-digitization company named Ripcord, which formally launched on Thursday. An anonymous reader quotes VentureBeat: Based in Hayward, California, Ripcord has machines that can scan, index, and categorize paper records to make them searchable through companies' existing systems, via the cloud... Upon receipt, Ripcord unboxes the files and passes them to its machines, which scan, upload, and convert the content into searchable PDFs. Ripcord says that the conversion and classification process is around 80 percent automated and covers handling, the removal of fasteners (e.g. staples), and scanning.
"It sounds silly at first, but a really big part of the reason why this has never been done before are staples," explains Business Insider. "Existing scanner systems require humans to pull staples, separate three-ring binders, unclip paper clips, and occasionally even unstrip duct tape before they can go through the system -- otherwise they jam up the works."

"Our robots work their magic," explains Ripcord's web site. They're charging .004 cents per page -- for every month that it's stored in the cloud.

54 comments

  1. No, thank you by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Having my records live in the "cloud"[1] is pretty much the last thing on Earth that I would want, from a security and privacy standpoint.

    [1] As someone once said, "There is no cloud; it's just someone else's computer."

    1. Re:No, thank you by BarbaraHudson · · Score: 2

      Some stuff needs to be stored for 15 years. At 0.004 a month per page, that's $0.72 per page. At that price, it's WAY cheaper to have someone remove the staples and scan it in locally, and not be dependent on them staying in business, not getting hacked, or raising prices.

      --
      "Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
    2. Re:No, thank you by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 1

      The summary says ".004 cents per page".

      Now, is this cost another case of VerizonMath? Do they mean really 0.004 cents or do they mean $0.004? If it's the former then it means 0.004 of $0.01, or $0.00004 per page, per month. That's $0.0072 per page for 15 years, not $0.72.

      --
      #DeleteFacebook
    3. Re:No, thank you by TWX · · Score: 1

      It depends on if you can retrieve your content and store it locally and stop paying a per-month charge.

      The idea that someone can do the grunt work cheaply appeals. As GP said though, the idea that it's stored on someone else's server very much does not appeal.

      There also may be problems with a failure to have the actual original in some cases. I could see that being an issue in contracts if there's a dispute, the other party can produce a paper copy that appears entirely genuine but all you have is an electronic copy, and if for some reason the two don't match, you might have to argue that your electronically scanned and then reproduced copy is just as authentic as the real thing.

      With the 15 year rule for some things it might just make more sense to push to go as close to paperless as possible from here forward, and to require electronic scanning of those documents that cannot be paperless from here forward, and with the existing records to just do what one has always done, which is to warehouse them until they've reached their legitimate destruction dates. After all, if one can't go 100% paperless because of things like contracts anyway, then there may still be a need for some document warehousing not matter what.

      --
      Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
    4. Re:No, thank you by BarbaraHudson · · Score: 1

      The original article does not say " $0.004 cents per page, per month". It says " $0.004 per page, per month", or 4/10 of a cent per page per month. That works out to $0.72 per page for 15 years, as per my post. :-)

      --
      "Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
    5. Re:No, thank you by reboot246 · · Score: 2

      There's no way our company would ever risk the information we have getting out where it's possible to be hacked, or worse yet, sold by this "paper-digitizing" company. We don't know who they are and what they'll do with the copies they keep, and you just know they'll keep copies.

    6. Re:No, thank you by Truekaiser · · Score: 1

      If you can view it, you can download it. Unless they demand the business use some kind of special program to view their own documents.
      In which case they might as well sell the robot tech. No one is going to take their cloud service.

    7. Re:No, thank you by geekmux · · Score: 1

      Some stuff needs to be stored for 15 years. At 0.004 a month per page, that's $0.72 per page. At that price, it's WAY cheaper to have someone remove the staples and scan it in locally, and not be dependent on them staying in business, not getting hacked, or raising prices.

      WAY cheaper?

      Are you considering the total annual cost of servers, redundant storage, backup hardware, software and media, software licenses, real estate costs/taxes, and IT staff to run it all? High-speed scanner hardware and minimum-wage staple pullers? Multiply all that by fifteen to obtain the total cost of long-term document storage and protection?

      With costs per page, it would all depend on volume when looking at what's cheaper. 100,000 pages would cost you less than $75K for fifteen years. A single competent SysAdmin (fully loaded) would cost more than that for one year, and you've not even spent money on hardware and software yet.

    8. Re:No, thank you by religionofpeas · · Score: 1

      Are you considering the total annual cost of servers, redundant storage, backup hardware, software and media, software licenses, real estate costs/taxes, and IT staff to run it all?

      Having all those things done by some external party doesn't magically reduce the cost.

      A single competent SysAdmin (fully loaded) would cost more than that for one year, and you've not even spent money on hardware and software yet.

      Apparently, you don't need a single competent sysadmin to maintain 100,000 scanned pages, otherwise they could never offer it so cheap.

    9. Re:No, thank you by BarbaraHudson · · Score: 1

      You don't need "servers, redundant storage, backup hardware, software and media, software licenses, and IT staff" to store boxes of documents. You fail.

      --
      "Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
    10. Re:No, thank you by geekmux · · Score: 1

      Are you considering the total annual cost of servers, redundant storage, backup hardware, software and media, software licenses, real estate costs/taxes, and IT staff to run it all?

      Having all those things done by some external party doesn't magically reduce the cost.

      Uh, yeah, it kind of does. If your company has a requirement to electronically warehouse documents and really has no other need for IT services, you either bear the burden of scanning, storing, and making it available in electronic format yourself, or you pay someone else to do all that.

      A single competent SysAdmin (fully loaded) would cost more than that for one year, and you've not even spent money on hardware and software yet.

      Apparently, you don't need a single competent sysadmin to maintain 100,000 scanned pages, otherwise they could never offer it so cheap.

      Again, volume matters. Their SysAdmin costs are not only shared across hundreds or thousands of customers managing millions or billions of pages, but their SysAdmin costs are also likely sourced from the most inexpensive resources available on the planet.

      And to keep any IT system up and running and maintained properly (security, patching, upgrades, maintenance, accounts, etc.), you need a competent SysAdmin to maintain the entire system. That tends to be true regardless of end use.

    11. Re:No, thank you by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 2

      So the summary was written by someone using VerizonMath.

      --
      #DeleteFacebook
    12. Re:No, thank you by religionofpeas · · Score: 1

      Most companies big enough to have 100,000 pieces of paperwork already have a competent SysAdmin of their own, who will also be responsible for the maintenance of all their current electronic documents. In that case, we're not talking about setting up an entire infrastructure for the scanned documents, rather we just use the infrastructure that's already there, and add the scanned paperwork to the existing electronic documentation. Maybe they'll have to buy an extra disk, and add it to the backup routine.

      but their SysAdmin costs are also likely sourced from the most inexpensive resources available on the planet.

      Well, if you put it like that, it sounds like the perfect candidate to handle the only copy of my precious private documents.

    13. Re:No, thank you by Mikkeles · · Score: 1

      I agree. They would have a really great deal if they could put the whole thing in, e.g., a shipping container, and transport one or more of them to your site and convert your paper records.

      This would open up the customer base to include such options as government (IRS, Health, DoD, CIA, etc.) and defense contractors who handle protected and classified material which cannot be sent/stored "in the cloud" as well as sensible and responsible organizations who won't.

      --
      Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
    14. Re: No, thank you by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > If your company has a requirement to electronically warehouse documents and really has no other need for IT services

      What kind of company would that be that has no need for IT services? No need to store any data at all? And if you are legally required to warehouse documents, I doubt they accept cloud storage that could go up in a puff any moment.

    15. Re:No, thank you by Neuronwelder · · Score: 1

      Anonymous - Thank you for your comment on the cloud. The average person on the street hasn't the foggiest notion that "The Cloud" is just someone else's computer. Nothing magical about it.

    16. Re:No, thank you by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Even then, if you can view it, you can copy it.

    17. Re: No, thank you by geekmux · · Score: 1

      > If your company has a requirement to electronically warehouse documents and really has no other need for IT services

      What kind of company would that be that has no need for IT services? No need to store any data at all? And if you are legally required to warehouse documents, I doubt they accept cloud storage that could go up in a puff any moment.

      Honestly, the first company profile that came to mind that has a requirement for records retention while usually not retaining full-time IT services is a legal firm. I've seen my fair share of small firms fit this profile quite well.

      And if you are legally required to warehouse documents, I doubt they accept cloud storage that could go up in a puff any moment.

      As far as documents going "up in a puff", that's kind of exactly what happens in the traditional scenario of an office building burning to the ground overnight. If you didn't hire a competent SysAdmin to maintain servers, backups, and tape media that would have been shipped offsite, all within a relevant disaster recovery plan, well then you're kind of fucked.

      Encryption is a perfectly acceptable (read: compliant) means of protecting sensitive data in the proverbial cloud, and you ensure that your cloud provider SLA mitigates against the "up in a puff" scenario properly, which is fairly easy to ensure data replication happens, and they are responsible for disaster recovery.

  2. Not first post by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    What in the fuck? im out, boys. peace

  3. So many questions by elrous0 · · Score: 2

    1) Can your robots read bad handwriting? Because a lot of paper documents have handwritten info.
    2) What kind of security/privacy guarantees can your offer, and do you have adequate insurance to cover claims from a major hack or data breach?
    3) Can I offload my documents from your cloud service to a different service or to my own servers?

    --
    SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
    1. Re:So many questions by JaredOfEuropa · · Score: 2

      #3 is the one that matters. Automatic scanning is great but why on earth would I want to store the resulting files with them at all?

      --
      If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
    2. Re:So many questions by Bite+The+Pillow · · Score: 2

      Is OCR that good yet? I understand that PDF can store the image, along with the text metadata for searching. So the text can be improved while retaining visual fidelity for when OCR improves. Or when an intern deciphers the handwriting.

      But as you say, I would want to do a lot of cleanup that relies on local availability, not cloud nonsense.

      And mid trial when AWS dies due to a typo, I'm going to go apeshit and your design is defective. So they have piles of disclaimers which automatically make this a suboptimal solution.

    3. Re:So many questions by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      They would be using industrial scanners. Some scanners actually have software simulated optics that can compensate for the curvature of paper, so they produce an high DPI image equivalent if the item were pressed onto a sheet of glass. Resolution would match or exceed a consumer flat-bed scanner eg. 300dpi to 1200dpi. Bad handwriting would be captured as is. All text that is successfully decoded would be placed on a secondary page, with the original and translated text highlighted together.

    4. Re:So many questions by TWX · · Score: 1

      Well, this is a photocopier that I'm talking about so obviously the quality of the OCR is not going to be as good as it could be in a dedicated machine, but what we get out of scanning documents that were entirely printed is arguably shit. When we process inventory to move it from place to place we have to do asset tracking paperwork and that means logging the asset tag as issued by the property control department, the serial number as issued by the manufacturer of the device, a description of the item, and status info, plus source facility, source room or location, destination facility, destination room or location, who moved it, when they moved it, who signed to release it, when they signed, who signed to receive, and when they received it.

      The scanned PDFs of these forms are convenient for perusing them by-date to find out what was moved when, but they're not useful for actually searching for any of the data that I just described because even plain Arial font doesn't scan well. We get "8" interpreted as "g", "1" interpreted as "I", "0" and "O", and vice-versa, etc. We get spaces or discontinuous text despite the characters being run up against each other as words. This is from first-gen paperwork, manually aligned on the scanner glass on the Canon copier, with the highest resolution black and white chosen. It's worse when we use the input hopper that can do multi-page scanning as the pages end up ever so slightly rotated and the discontinuous words are much worse and the interpretation errors spread to characters that shouldn't be misinterpreted.

      --
      Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
    5. Re:So many questions by idji · · Score: 1

      This is a document preparation solution to reduce the costs of preparing documents for scanning. Scanning and OCR are secondary to what they are offering. Don't mix up an OCR engine with what they are doing here. You can plug in any OCR engine that you want into this kind of workflow.

    6. Re:So many questions by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      almost certainly as good as, if not better, than that same bad handwriting piled in an unused box.

    7. Re:So many questions by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This is more of a service that satisfies the legal requirements e.g. for lawyers to have documents for their files for a period of five years, and for doctors to keep any pertinent document for a period of seven years. Most likely they vary from state to state. Handwriting? Well, a snapshot is taken by the copier, and that shot may be the best one yet, in quality. We tried one of the local stores that did this sort of thing, and it can get very expensive, but have them discard the papers after burning to DVD, and your home office becomes less of a fire hazard. Or you can rent out that new-found space and not have to deal with renting public storage spaces.

    8. Re:So many questions by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Lots of reasons including legal compliance, derp?

    9. Re: So many questions by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This is why you store the high-res image along with the ocrd text, so you can always re-ocr it when the software gets better. PDF/A can do that. You should see the text rendering as a searching aid (which might or not work), not as the storage format of the scanned document. OCR will never be so reliable that you can safely delete the image. Anyway the paper original isn't searchable except by eyeballs, so even a 10% recognition is already added value.

  4. It sounds silly at first by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The second and third times too.

  5. Robot Arms (Not the Hotel) Take Men's Jobs by pipingguy · · Score: 0

    The cute graphic of their automated system at their website is nice but we all know that it's really thousands of H-1B workers with foreign masters degrees doing all the work in a hidden basement. And you know what the guy who invented the robot arm first used it for/testing it with? Pussy grabbing!

    1. Re:Robot Arms (Not the Hotel) Take Men's Jobs by TWX · · Score: 1

      I thought it was for penis grabbing, at least that's what I saw on this long-running documentary about the initial formation of the Universe that's been on TV every week.

      The science on this documentary is very weak, they seem to go for several episodes between discussing actual science and even then they only hint at it.

      --
      Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
    2. Re:Robot Arms (Not the Hotel) Take Men's Jobs by pipingguy · · Score: 1

      But are there boobs?

  6. Cost by religionofpeas · · Score: 1

    Scanning & handling paper - 0.004 cents per page
    All your private data on someone else's server - priceless.

    1. Re:Cost by arth1 · · Score: 1

      Scanning & handling paper - 0.004 cents per page

      Per month. A million pages will be $4,000 per month, or $52,000 per year at this introductory rate.

      The risk seems great that a corporate manager will fall for the temptation of saving the company a chunk of reoccurring expenses, and at the same time erasing its historical records.

    2. Re:Cost by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 1

      http://verizonmath.blogspot.ca...

      $40 per month for one million pages?

      --
      #DeleteFacebook
    3. Re:Cost by TWX · · Score: 1

      Of course. No one ever likes to do the long-term math.

      I'm contending with a group wanting to move our main server facility and ISP connection to an offsite hosting location and to just make us one of the links on the private WAN like any other facility, even though we have the generator and environmental already paid-for. They were really gung-ho until a final tally on the costs came back from the provider and somehow some price doubled or was otherwise misinterpreted from the initial talks, and it appears that these plans are being reconsidered. I'm hopeful since it's much easier to walk down to the server farm to fix a broken device and if I missed a tool I can walk back to my office to get it, as opposed to having to drive across town and hope that I grabbed everything that I needed.

      --
      Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
    4. Re:Cost by BarbaraHudson · · Score: 1

      From the original article: " $0.004 per page, per month". Not 0.004 cents per page.

      --
      "Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
    5. Re: Cost by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well there goes my salary, rip.

    6. Re:Cost by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 1

      Then the author of the summary is as bad as Verizon.

      --
      #DeleteFacebook
  7. Steve Wozniak, dressed as a robot. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Admit it, you can see it now : Steve Wozniak in a cardboard box robot outfit, removing staples.

    1. Re:Steve Wozniak, dressed as a robot. by arth1 · · Score: 2

      Woz' involvement here seems to be rather less than what the clickbait title indicates. He's put money in an angel company who decided to invest in this company..

    2. Re:Steve Wozniak, dressed as a robot. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      either way, woz needs to be a little more careful of who he gives his money to.

    3. Re:Steve Wozniak, dressed as a robot. by Aighearach · · Score: 1

      Yeah, but he would only manage a few staples per hour. He surely must have a whole army of oompa-loompas pulling staples in the background, and driving around on Name Brand(TM) personal mobility devices.

  8. Longevity by arth1 · · Score: 1

    They're charging .004 cents per page -- for every month that it's stored in the cloud.

    And that's why I am worried about approaches like this. Documents that were maturing for posterity in a basement are now subject to a rental fee, and once a bean counter decides not to pay that, they're gone.
    That may be okay for documents that aren't of any value to future document diggers, but I fear that much of future history will be lost if subject to a rent troll.

    1. Re:Longevity by BarbaraHudson · · Score: 1
      They're not charging "0.004 cents per page per month. It's 4/10 of a cent per page per month:

      $0.004 per page, per month

      4.8 cents per page per year, or $48/year per 1,000 pages. A banker's box holds 5,000 pages, so $240 a year per box of documents just for storage. That adds up pretty quickly for a large business. You could probably store the physical boxes cheaper and more securely (and you probably have to keep the physical copies anyways) at a place that specializes in secure document storage.

      --
      "Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
    2. Re:Longevity by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You don't think physical document storage costs money ?

    3. Re:Longevity by Aighearach · · Score: 1

      Physical storage costs money too. Less money.

  9. Nope by p51d007 · · Score: 1

    Some businesses might...but with HIPAA laws, banking laws and lawyers, the security of "in the cloud" no matter how secure, might put some people off on this.

    1. Re:Nope by lgw · · Score: 1

      Some businesses might...but with HIPAA laws, banking laws and lawyers, the security of "in the cloud" no matter how secure, might put some people off on this.

      It doesn't matter how secure it is, it matters how secure the auditors say it is. A startup will do quite poorly by this measure, while the companies with years of good lobbying will have arranged things so that it's fine.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
  10. they can't make this 100% reliable by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    What if it rips up a convolute and jams and the scans are unusable? To judge by the sorry state of Googlebooks scans, scanning errors are very likely even when done by professionals. Then we would need a Stasischnipselmaschine to reconstruct the original. The problem is, reconstruction of shredded paper documents is not a solved problem either. So the original could get irrevocably lost and we might not even know how important it was. Conclusion, destructive scanning of unique documents is unacceptable.

  11. Another Alex plaything funded by Woz by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Look carefully. The founder is a personal friend of Woz. Alex has made a career of zombie start-ups that Steve helps fund with either his money or lending credibility to get other investors. Sad that this guy relies on Woz still to pay his way. Strip away the hype, this is just a conveyor belt system to feed ocr scanners. Not much IP here.

  12. Big deal about removing staples by Swave+An+deBwoner · · Score: 1

    Any cheap paper shredder can deal with staples.

    The more elegant solution is to just shred the papers before digitizing them.