Last week I got to spend another week in Japan, this time most mostly in the Tokyo area, although I did make it to the Ishikawa Prefecture for my usual run through Komatsu, Kanazawa and Unoke.  As usual I won't talk much about the business side of the trip for many reasons, including the fact that you probably don't care... not that you really care about any of this, but I figured if you made it this far I'd at least try and keep you attention before you just browse the pictures and move on with your life.

I spent Tuesday in Kawasaki, which I found out means (River) Kawa (Hope) Saki.  Guess all those motorcycle racers need to rethink their coolness now.   Luckily I quit racing green bikes at an early age.  Anyway, Kawasaki is a nice place and seemed like a fairly expensive area to live.  After our presentations, we got to eat dinner in the Ginza district which is basically the Japanese Time Square.  Lights everywhere (see pictures) and of all the places I got to visit this time I would have loved to spent more time here and enjoyed the nightlife.

Wednesday was spent in Ishikawa with more presentations and dinner at a very traditional Japanese restaurant.  We had to sit on the floor which was bad enough, but I couldn't eat because I couldn't bend far enough to reach the table.  I'm getting too old.

Thursday was spent site seeing in Kanazawa before flying back to Tokyo.  I got to visit Kenrokuen Park and Kanazawa Castle again.  The great thing this time was the cherry blossoms.  Check out the pictures!  Thursday night was spent near Shinigawa station eating Yakitorri (Grilled Chicken).  This place was the size of my bedroom, but was packed with 50 people or so.  Crazy thing about eating chicken in Japan is that you eat all the chicken.  We had hearts, livers even the bones.

Friday was a site seeing tour of Tokyo.  We visited the Tokyo tower, where Gregg became a rock star to all the school girls.  I guess they thought he was Tom Cruise or something.  Who knows, but they loved him.  We then went to Asasuka where the big Buddhist temple is, followed by the Kabuki Theatre.  This was a very interesting traditional Japanese play and you'll have to Google to understand more as it's very difficult to explain.  Afterwards we had Sukiyaki back in the Ginza district.

All in all it was a good trip and the best part was of course the heated seats!  You just don't realize how great these really are until you expect one to be warm in the middle of the night and realize it wasn't turned on when you sit down.

See the Pictures Here.

Take care,

Chris

We took another major step this week to building the ultimate Capture application for SharePoint.  We now have the ability to create searchable PDF documents directly from the client application without the need to send documents to a server side process first.  There is of course a lag when doing the OCR, so for high volume applications I still suggest using our Capture Server product.  What is nice however is that the OCR process runs in a separate thread along with saving to SharePoint so after you scan, you can send the PDF documents and immediately start scanning again.  This should make KnowledgeLake Capture significantly more usable than non threaded applications.... yes competition, you know who you are.

The new PDF support comes right after the support for ISIS we had just announced in February.  Some of the other features of our capture software include:

• Use of barcodes and patch codes to separate documents
• Ability to automatically index from bar codes
• Ability to automatically classify documents into Content Types in SharePoint
• Ability to clean up scanned documents, removing noise and automatically deskewing
• Automatic removal of blank pages
• Zonal OCR capabilities
• Forms Recognition
• much, much more....

For a complete list of features and trail software, check out our web site at http://www.knowledgelake.com.

-Chris