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I am a big Google fan. I love the way they turn markets upside down. Search has been revolutionised, they have ventured into the operating system market, and they are doing amazing things with library books to the Internet. That’s all great. I think though, the inner geek is shining through with their maps.

Yesterday someone from our Sydney office needed directions to get to a partner’s office on Miller Street, Chesterfield from North Sydney, Australia. Chesterfield happens to be a suburb not to far away from North Sydney but also a location in South Carolina, USA. I would think, if I were Google,  and two results came up for the same name I would either go with the closer destination or maybe offer an alternative.

Google Maps however thought it would be hilarious to have us kayak across the Pacific ocean to Japan. Ha ha. It’s all well and good to offer a great service but sometimes you just have to be a little bit more realistic.  We had a good laugh but decided we were not inclined to go paddling.

Side-splittingly hilarious, but not very helpful.

It has been touted for many years that paper would become a relic of times-gone-by and the world of electronic communication has made the process of modern business less reliant on the ancient technology.

Today, very few businesses use paper to send letters between offices or memos between employees and the reams of paper that used to pour through offices is now a thing of the past.

Sellerbyte is sitting at the forefront of this ‘paper revolution’.

Two of the company’s products Ecofiling and 2Large2Email are leading the way to an increasingly paperless world.

These programs remove the need for paper from many common tasks conducted daily in offices around the world.

While paper still remains a staple of the office environment for many applications, the number of tasks that can be conducted without paper has increased steadily.

Basic paper tasks, such as reading newspapers and letters, have already been made almost obsolete and the process is moving into more complex areas.

High level office tasks are now the target of software developers, like Sellerbyte, and the Ecofiling and 2Large2Email programs represent a rapidly expanding range of paperless solutions.

The revolution is dependent on this kind of software development and giving users a better experience with more efficient outcomes than the preceding technology is the name of the game.

The concept of a completely paperless world may sound impossible but it drives the innovation process and gives companies like Sellerbyte a strong incentive to continue the development of software which will facilitate the transition.

The process will be long - paper has been used for over two thousand years and is ingrained in the communication habits of all peoples – but all good things take time.

I’ve been doing a lot of contracts and agreements lately, and one thing I’ve noticed is that I’m using whole lot of paper. And I mean whole lot! Just yesterday I had to print four copies of a 20 page agreement.  Two for me and two for a supplier.

It strikes me as a waste, not only of paper, ink but also of valuable time. Even Web-based businesses often still require printed and signed contracts to be sent to their offices or legal departments before contracts take affect. This is crazy! I give much kudos to those companies with foresight and vision who are prepared to invest the time and money it takes to have online agreements in place.

I envisage a Web application that allows two or more parties to engage on a Web-based document with digital signatures, collaboration and security to enable agreements to be signed and authorised without printing a single page.   I imagine  the agreement could be e-mailed as a PDF attachment to all of the stakeholders. To be honest, I don’t think this would be too difficult. Of course, the legal enforce ability of such a contract would have to be confirmed before the parties engaged in its use.

Maybe such a Web application already exists? I don’t know of any that can be used on a per use, or subscription basis, but I’m pretty sure there will be a market for it in the future.

Yesterday, I got a new toy. It is called Dictate from MacSpeech and its speech recognition from Mac OS X. so today, I have decided to write a dialogue, or should I say speak a clog.

I am not going to make any edits or corrections to what the software detects as my voice. Sir everything on the screen will actually be what I have said, were at least the software’s interpretation of what I said. So when I installed the software it basically said that they had to train the software to my voice at ramming through a five-minute storytelling process. All I had to do was read a story that appeared on the screen. Apparently the software would recognize what I was saying and adapt to my voice pattern. And the more I use this software is the more accurate it becomes however you can tell that there are still quite a few little errors appearing from time to time.

People here in the office have asked me why I’m bothering spending the time with this new technology. Well, yesterday morning was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. One of our partners in China sent me an e-mail that required a significant and lengthy response to ensure that all the details and content was accurate and not confusing. I ended up spending about one hour typing a document that was in my head. In other words, I knew what I needed to write I just needed to type it and put it on the screen. In all it would have been over 1000 words. Afterwards I realised that I just wasted a full hour typing a document that would have taken about 10 minutes on a telephone call to convey verbally. One of the other guys here in the office is an author and he swears by DragonDictate for writing his books. After his encouragement and goading I decided it would be worth my time up front for a longer term benefit.

Considering the fact that our reply to about 250 e-mails a day, I honestly believe that accurate dictation software would really speed up the way they do business. I suppose even with the edits that I would need to make to a real story or e-mail that I was writing it would take me that long to go back through and make some grammar and punctuation corrections.   Obviously, reading back through this now, I can see that the software has made a few mistakes. I have to say no considering I only started using it yesterday it’s doing pretty well, even if it doesn’t understand is that the common words like the abbreviation for Web log.

I can only type at about 40-45 words per minute so even if this thing does create a few errors that I have to edit, I am still well in front.

I love technology, systems and all other practices that make businesses more productive and efficient. I have a feeling that by the time the software has properly adapted to my voice pattern (or I have learnt to speak properly) it will be more accurate, faster and a lot more reliable to use than to actually type documents and e-mail is. Maybe in a few weeks I will do another sample of text just to see if the software has improved its accuracy to make it an even better business tool.

By the way — this block of text only took me about  2 1/2 minutes to speak and would have taken me at least 15 minutes or maybe even 20 to type.