New service cleans up whiteboard pics with an email (opens in new tab)

I really like this trend of Posterous-inspired web apps that don't require setting up an account, just emailing into a public email address. It's what changed my mind from "eh, looks nice, might try it later when it's more robust" to "oh why not, let me email something in and see what happens".

And now the demo of your web app generates a mailing list of potential future customers along the way. Smart.

(in the FAQ)

  [Q:] It does funny stuff to my other pictures (not drawings).
  [A:] Yes, yes it does. :)

This could open the door to worlds of fun with people who try to push the boundaries... like... I dunno, send back a picture of a garden gnome in a bikini if there's no solid background.

Really great idea, but most advanced whiteboard cleanup software includes perspective correction and things like that.. As far as I can tell this just is a color-scale modifier and sharpener.

However the idea behind the service, whiteboard cleanup via email, is pretty sound. I would love to have this with features that allow me to send the pic along with list of 'end product' recipients.

Need some https secured site as well for sensitive whiteboard snaps.

This is a great idea. I uploaded a test photo and the results were very good.

The only observable problem was some image artifacting where the original showed reflections of overhead fluorescent lights.

Here is my before and after for comparison:

Before: http://i.imgur.com/YjWqB.jpg After: http://i.imgur.com/Bi7pS.jpg

It worked pretty well, although it did produce some noise with my image. However that's probably to be expected with a service like this. Nevertheless, it made the picture much more readable.

Here are the before and after photos: http://imgur.com/wPgl8&G80Lz

I agree with some of the comments. The noise around the edge of the whiteboard can be distracting. OCR would be a nice touch if you can get it to work as well.

Another thing that could be useful is automatic cropping so that the picture contains more content and less empty space. Maybe have an option to divide the picture into individual photos if there's enough whitespace? That way you could have separate photos for separate diagrams.

Just tried it on an image where the whiteboard was poorly cropped -- lots of junk around the edges of the pic. The drawing itself was cleaned pretty well, but the extra stuff was distractingly multi-colored.

It would be nice if it could detect the edges of the whiteboard and crop. As Goosey mentioned, perspective correction would be nice as well.

Love the idea as an email service, and look forward to seeing what comes next.

Since it's targeted specifically to blackboard drawings/diagrams, maybe it would be possible to vectorize the output

My apologies to someone, a pic didn't make it back: mattp@a-bb.net had a permanent delivery failure. No idea how to contact them...hope they were here and see this.

A friendly request: if anyone is willing to share their before / after I'd love to see them (including any suggestions / requests you have for tweaking), and I'd like to put them up as a gallery, with your permission of course.

Thanks for all of this great feedback!

It fails miserably on my chalkboard photo test (it doesn't claim to support chalkboard, but it seems like it should - it probably doesn't take much to determine the background is all dark and run the appropriate scripts)

Your 4 step instructions have doodle@, but the actual mailto: is for wb@. It's a minor thing, but you should be consistent.

Cool idea. I think you could run pretty far with a posterous style lazy signup and more options (like the dropbox idea, some storage, etc.) Maybe support group emails, so dev@ when sent from my email address returns a response to a certain 5 people.

It would be neat to consider other types of images you could "clean up" or alter for people - sort of like a Posterous-meets-Photoshop app. An obvious example that comes to mind would be to remove red eye from pictures. I know a lot of photo editing apps can do this already, but just think how much easier it would be for most people to just send an email and get a cleaned up version back. Boom, done.

Don't know how feasible this is, and you've got a lot of room to grow in your current segment already, but would be neat to see where else this could be applied to!

Tried it out. We actually have these funky glass "whiteboards" and it still came out pretty well. A slightly higher resolution output would be nice. Handwriting is hard to read without zooming in a couple of times.

Other than that, I agree with some of the suggestions below. Cleaning up the display is probably 90% of what I want, so this is great. One note- I entered some text in the subject line; it would be nice if this got preserved somewhere to make searching my email easier.

Nice and simple. Good job.

You probably know this, there's http://www.scanr.com/ that tackles a similar problem.

I know it's just a GIMP script but I was pretty impressed at how well the returned image was.

My only advice is to make the instructions clearer. It's quite a simple idea "send a whiteboard photo to XYZ, get a clean version back" but I had to go to a second page, scroll down quite a bit, then click a few other pages to find out exactly what happens when I send a photo. I might be dimmer than the average customer though.

Why does it resale the image?

I sent a 640x411 image and got back a 800x514

Also an area of solid black turned into cyan and magenta. (The image I tried was http://i42.tinypic.com/169lppj.jpg - and yes I know it's not a whiteboard, but it looks like one.)

It would be nice to treat the response as a reply (preserve subject, etc.) so that Gmail can do threading properly.

Here's a before and after test, looks like it needs some tuning for images that are not as low contrast

http://sprng.me/154k6

p.s. that's a springpad link, awesome to just share those stuff from your phone

This is a great idea!

It would be interesting to see this combined with a project management system. I imagine being able to snap your whiteboard, have the image cleaned, and placed right onto a project wiki, in one move (similar to Posterous, perhaps).

The email feature is great though a file uploader on the main page wouldn't be missed. ;)

Need more description on the first page. Maybe the 4 easy steps from the other page?

this is awesome! i was brainstorming about how to do something like this a few weeks ago when one of my fellow students brogth his digital slr in instead of taking notes..

we started as a group of about 20 or so comp sci students, taking joint notes in google wave for 2 semesters now.. it works great except if there are alot of diagrams.. and ascii diagrams just take too long and dont do the original justice. so we started adding pictures..

i am excited to have a tool to clean them up now =)

ps anyone else doing this joint notes thing? if not you should try it.. it works wonders for studying for tests

Without complicating the service at all, I would love to see Dropbox integration. We use Dropbox for all of our shared files and being able to go from: Whiteboard->Email to Service->Dropbox immediately would be amazing.

potentially off-topic, but i'm SO glad that the title of this post wasn't "Check out our new start-up: cleaning up whiteboard pics via email!!!" the pitch is honest and straight-forward, and not overselling. excellent work

I can't use this without knowing how long you'll store whatever I send you.

Do you have any thoughts on a future revenue model? Maybe build out some kind of add-on "pro" features?

I'm surprised Evernote doesn't handle this - or does it? Maybe they'd like to buy the technology.

Are you planning on making a simple API or is email to be considered as the API?

Is it actually just imagemagick and a procmail script?

PS: If you've got one of those old fashioned iPhings, check out JotNot which does this sort of thing on the phone.

Could it be abused by spammers?

Getting any traction yet?

Alternative: Learn to use Inkscape.