Microsoft Debuts Office Lens, A Document-Scanning App For iOS And Android

UK’s myDogBuddy Merges With Spain’s Bibulu To Become Europe’s Largest Dog Sitting MarketplaceMicrosoft today launched Office Lens, a mobile document scanner app that works with OneNote, for iOS and Android smartphones. The app, which allows users to snap photos of paper documents, receipts, business cards, menus, whiteboards, sticky notes and more, was first launched a year ago as an application designed only for Windows Phone devices.
But in conjunction with the company’s newer strategy to embrace other platforms outside its own, the app has now arrived on Apple’s App Store and on Android phones, where it will sit alongside dozens of other Microsoft applications, including Office and Outlook.
Office Lens’ core functionality itself is not all that different from a number of document-scanning applications on the mobile app stores today, like Scanner Pro, TinyScan Pro, Scanbot and more. And much like Evernote’s Scannable app, for example, it exists more as an add-on or complement to a larger, more prominent product – in Microsoft’s case, OneNote.
Like most scanner apps, Office Lens identifies the text on the images it captures using optical character recognition (OCR), which allows you to later locate the file in question using keyword search in OneNote or in Microsoft’s cloud storage site, OneDrive. You can also convert the images you scan of paper files and whiteboards into Microsoft Office formats and more, including Word documents, PowerPoint presentations and even PDFs and JPGs. These can be inserted into OneNote as images, the company says.

In addition, Microsoft says that Office Lens offers a business-card scanning function that lets you turn cards into contacts you can add to your smartphone’s address book. That initially sounds similar to the functionality that Evernote Scannable offers, you’ll think. However Evernote also pulls in LinkedIn details, which is handy as it allows you to grow your network. (LinkedIn used to offer its own card-scanning app, but later shut it down and pointed people to Evernote instead.)
But with Office Lens, the process of turning cards into contacts is more involved than with Scannable. As a previous Microsoft blog post explained, it still involves the use of OneNote. That is, OneNote is able to recognize the contact information on the card, then you can open the attached VCF file from the OneNote app to save the contact details to Outlook or your phone’s contact list.
In Scannable, by way of comparison, you simply tap one button to save the scanned card to your phone’s contacts. That makes Scannable the better option for those looking mainly for a business card scanner, while Office Lens is really about catering to the heavy OneNote-using crowd instead.
Also like Evernote Scannable, Microsoft’s app also offers the ability to create an online archive of your scans in its own OneDrive service.
The new Office Lens app is available on the iTunes App Store for iOS users, while Android users are being asked to join the “preview” for the product via Google+. From here, they’ll be able to test the version ahead of its public debut.
The release comes at a time when Microsoft, a historically more closed company that tried to keep customers in its own ecosystem, has been expanding to other platforms besides its own.
Today, the company has extended some of its most popular products and services to competing mobile platforms like iOS and Android, including by launching Office for iOS late last year, as well as Outlook for iOS and Android, various MSN properties, OneDrive and more. In fact, the company now has over 100 iOS and Android applications in total.

By: Unknown On 01:09

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Microsoft Brings Collaboration To New Office Tool Sway

What The Kapors Have Learned From Years Of Working On Diversity in TechRemember Sway? It’s a recent addition to Microsoft’s Office suite, blending together note taking, presenting, and now, collaboration. The software is notable in that it was launched first in-browser, a step away from the traditional, desktop-focused Office apps like Word and Excel.
Sway was opened to the general public in December of 2014. At the time, Microsoft noted that it had picked up a million unique visitors to Sway’s website, and 175,000 “requests to join.” Presumably those figures are now far surpassed. I’ve asked Microsoft for refreshed numbers, and will update this post when I hear back from the firm.
TechSupport has kept an eye on Sway since its introduction because it’s a new page of sorts for the Office crew — if you were going to build a new Office product, what would it be? Microsoft seems comfortable with Sway sitting somewhere on a cloud, in between the use-cases of Word, and Power Point.
Also out today is the ability to copy Sways, so that you can have a version of your own. That will be useful among groups, when people might want to preserve a specific version or the like for later use.
Microsoft lagged behind Google in bringing real-time collaboration to its productivity tools, and has yet to finish the project. It’s good, therefore, to see the company keep the work moving forward.

By: Unknown On 23:39

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Watch Tech’s Takeover of San Francisco’s Office Space In This Visualization

Here’s a visualization of all the major commercial real estate deals involving the tech industry and San Francisco’s SOMA district over the past three years, thanks to Stamen Design and broker Kalin Kelly, who finds space on behalf of tech companies and nonprofits.
The point of this visualization is not a surprise. It’s known that there are lots of tech companies in the SOMA neighborhood of San Francisco.
“What I wanted to convey with this piece was this huge trend or movement south into SOMA. Tech makes up 60 percent of the office space in the neighborhood,” said Kelly, who predicts that companies will start moving into the West SOMA area between 5th and 10th street. “Maybe 5 percent of space is actually available. There’s not a lot there and it’s slim pickings for growing companies.”
Kelly and Stamen Design’s founder Eric Rodenbeck sit at the intersection of a complex debate about how excruciatingly limited space should be used between tech companies, non-profits and the arts. Rodenbeck helms one of the leading studios in the field of data visualization and is buying up buildings to permanently set aside for arts groups like Counterpulse through a project called CAST, or the Community Arts Stabilization Trust.
“If you don’t have galleries and space for performances, there will be no there there to it,” Rodenbeck said.
His effort has been accelerated and complicated by an influx of tech companies into the city, which have pushed commercial office space rents to around $67 per square foot for top Class A space. That’s pretty much equal to the dot-com bubble peak.
The cost pressures are so intense that a deal to build a mixed-use project with housing and an arts center in the Tenderloin fell apart this week after two years of effort between the developer and the city government.
As recently as five years ago, the technology industry’s center of gravity was down on the peninsula, somewhere around Palo Alto. That’s where it has mostly been for the last half-century, although there was a group of dot-com era startups that were centered in the city 15 years ago.
So how did this migration happen? Some of it is part of a nationwide trend, where urban city centers have seen a 0.5 percent increase in jobs per year between 2007 and 2011 while the job creation in the periphery has declined or stagnated, according to this study by City Observatory.
Some of the migration is specific to the Bay Area. Job growth in Silicon Valley and San Francisco has outpaced almost every other metropolitan area in the country. The cities in the South Bay are equally stressed for both office and residential space, with Mountain View entering tense negotiations with Google as it prepares to announce plans for a new headquarters this week.
The industry’s biggest successes founded a decade ago or more like Facebook, Google and LinkedIn are all headquartered on the peninsula. But after about 2006 when Twitter was founded, the major companies start — and grow up — in San Francisco. Voters also altered San Francisco’s tax structure to be more in line with what other comparable cities do by switching from a payroll tax to a gross receipts tax.
As you can see on the map, there were a bunch of mid-size office deals in early 2012 from Airbnb to Yelp and Yammer. But the big one was Zynga in late 2012, when it moved into its 668,000 square foot headquarters around Showplace Square.
The office space biggest deals in 2012 include Zynga, Salesforce and Square.
That was followed the next quarter by Salesforce in several deals across the northern part of SOMA and Square in mid-Market. Uber follows that with another lease for 88,000 square feet the following quarter and Google ends up being the biggest commercial real estate deal of 2013.
2013’s biggest deal is Google’s lease for 372,000 square feet up around the Embarcadero.
Between Google, Dropbox and Pinterest, 2014 was a total frenzy with more than a dozen major deals, all involving at least a hundred thousand square feet of space. Not only did Twitter finally move into its mid-Market headquarters, Uber straight up bought land for its headquarters while Salesforce set itself up to anchor the city’s tallest tower in 2017.
2014 almost broke office leasing records in the city with major deals from Salesforce, LinkedIn to Uber going all-in on buying up land to build its own headquarters in Mission Bay.
Kalin said that venture firms and technology companies need to be more active in real estate policy in the city, with rents often being the top line item for startups after talent. She pointed to a recent listing in South Park where a broker was fishing for a $120 per square foot rate, which is double the going rate in the city.
“If startup founders and VCs were more educated about the market, we wouldn’t be seeing $120 per square foot listings,” she said. “Tech companies don’t have to be rampant gentrifiers. They can also contribute to the civic vitality of the city and keep it a vibrant place.”
Indeed, the city is still in the process of planning changes to the “Central SOMA” area that may shift industrially-zoned land to office use and boost height limits, which has myriad consequences for tech companies and non-profits alike.

By: Unknown On 10:19

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