You know those tests that you have to fill out when signing up for new web services? The ones that ask you to enter the text you see in a box to prove that you're human? Those are called CAPTCHAs. And a company called reCAPTCHA does something really interesting with them.

It finds hard-to-read text scanned from old newspapers and books. Because the ink and paper isn't in such good shape, spambots have a hard time reading the words, but people usually don't have too much trouble. And when you're entering a word in the box, you're actually helping reCAPTCHA's software to get better at reading these old texts.

Now if your'e starting to see why a company like Google, which has been scanning old and new books like mad over the last few years, might be interested in reCAPTCHA, you're not alone. Google announced today that it's acquiring the company. Web sites that use reCAPTCHA to protect themselves and their users from spam and fraud will continue to be able to use the service, because honestly, reCAPTCHA wouldn't be as useful to Google if the company were to shut off that part of the service.

via Business Insider

Recently our sister publication, TUAW, did a series of posts about each blogger's favorite iPhone and iPod Touch apps. We thought here at Download Squad that we'd take that same approach and apply it to our favourite Windows applications. This first post is my first of three in this vein that will cover Evernote, FeedDemon, and MindManager.

Evernote

It seems you can't go very far online these days without someone extolling the virtues of Evernote. While this note-taking application has been around for a long time, it has recently been reborn as a cross-platform powerhouse. The original concept behind Evernote was that you had one scrolling piece of note paper that you could continue to add notes to, then easily search within them both based on content and based on a timeline of when your notes were created. While this paradigm still exists, it's no longer Evernote's claim to fame.

Evernote now has a powerful web application that serves as a central nervous system for your note taking. All of your notes that are created in the local Evernote client on your Windows (or Mac) computer are synchronized to Evernote's servers, where they can apply OCR (optical character recognition) to any images that you have included in your notes. This means that you can search for a word that is visible in a photo, and Evernote will find it.

Evernote's interface has been refined over the past few years and is very easy to navigate and use. On the Windows platform most people seem to pit Evernote against OneNote from Microsoft, and in my opinion with the advent of Evernote's server-based system and reliable synchronization, it's no contest.

A free account at Evernote is enough for most users, offering up to 40 MB of file transfer per month, but if you find you are a heavy user you may need to upgrade to a Premium account, which offers 500 MB of transfer per month, plus other features.

So, simple American boy meets an attractive American flatbed scanner. It is a story we have all heard a hundred times, right? What happens in the story is the boy falls in love with the scanner, pledges it all his paper and digital bliss for as long as the scanners warranty is good. So he takes the scanner home, carries it over the threshold, and plugs it into the wall and into the back of his computer. A match made in NewEgg? The boy cares for the scanner, gets the latest drivers, makes sure he buys the best high speed shielded USB cable, and everything is peachy. Wait, what, no OCR software? Why wasn't that in the prenup? Where's my PaperPort disc? "I don't have Textbridge" he thinks, "maybe I was getting into this a little too fast, I mean I didn't even read the quick-start manual!"

Never fear, SimpleOCR is here. Available for free download, SimpleOCR is a great addition or even replacement for your OCR software. It is especially handy for those who do not have a good OCR software with which to recognize text from scanned documents. It has a fairly solid accuracy ratio, and learns as you go. Give it a shot! I use it at work right now, and it seems to do a bit better than others I have tried.