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Originally published on 06/17/2002
If you're a professional musician, incorrectly turning a page of sheet music can throw a real wrench into your performance. With some solo piano pieces, in fact, it's nearly impossible for the pianist to find the time between notes to do it, so they have a page-turning assistant perched right next to them -- a whole additional level of complexity.
Fast Facts:
Kirtas Technologies
www.kirtas-tech.com |
| CEO |
Lotfi Belkhir
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| HQ |
Los Gatos, CA
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| Founded |
June 2001
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| Employees |
4
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| Market |
Media handling and digital imaging
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| Funding |
$205,000 in angel/seed funding; currently raising A round of about $1.25M
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| Profitable? |
Projected in Q2 2003
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This problem is being addressed by a small startup called FreeHand Systems, which will soon be selling a Linux-powered tablet computer designed for displaying sheet music. The musician can turn the pages with a foot pedal or a tap on the screen. It's a fancy e-book, yes, but it solves a real problem in a real vertical market.
On the broader scale, there's the problem of getting books and bound records scanned into computers. Modern volumes created on computers are of course computer-ready, but millions of books and megatons of corporate records are offline -- much to the detriment of businesses and library patrons -- because scanning bound documents is slow and expensive.
And it's turning the pages that costs the money. There are apparently no good page-turning technologies on the market, so even the fanciest book scanners are bottlenecked by the need to hire people to flip pages.
Lotfi Belkhir, the CEO of Kirtas Technologies, tells me his company has engineered a system that uses a special vacuum arm, prisms, and a high-resolution camera to scan bound volumes, hands-off, at up to 20 pages per minute. His company's key asset, it appears, is its primary engineer, the man who developed the first paper feeder for Xerox.
The primary market of the $150,000 device is imaging services bureaus, companies that perform document management services for corporations. Libraries are a secondary target.
- Rafe Needleman
email: rafe-needleman@catchoday.com
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