OCR

["Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>]

> From Slashdot:
"An anonymous reader writes "Google recently released 
[0]Tesseract as open source. Originally developed at the HP Labs 
from 1985-1995, it has been touted as one of the most accurate 
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) programs available. Having 
sat on the shelf gathering dust for so many years, Google cleaned 
up some of the more outdated portions of the code and released it 
for general consumption. You can [1]download Tesseract over at 
Sourceforge."

JE:  The business connection is clear.  Improved OCR means more 
indexable text online, which plays to Google's core business. 
Smart move.  It's interesting to see how some successful 
companies strive to build environments and not just products (See 
James Moore, "The Death of Competition").

Joe Esposito