The Ultimate Cloud Computing Application - May 31, 2009 at 11:52 pm

Hundreds, or even thousands, of companies claim they have created Cloud Computing-based applications.  I don’t doubt that in the least.  However, almost all of these applications either a) use the company’s own platform or b) leverage one or two infrastructures, such as Force.com, Amazon Web Services or Google.  Very few applications leverage more than two Cloud Computing applications.

Here at Model Metrics we have created an application that utilizes not one or two platforms, but an application that leverages four platforms.  The application is called CardLasso (www.cardlasso.com), which is a solution that enables users to take a picture of a business card, have that image transcribed into usable data, and then made available for download to a csv file, a vcard, or for upload into the users Salesforce CRM org.

Here’s how it works.  Taking a picture of the business card is not difficult.  CardLasso lets the user use a mobile phone camera such as the iPhone or the webcam most folks have on their PC’s.  The picture is then sent to a service provided by Amazon Web Services called Mechanical Turk.  Think of Mechanical Turk as a cloud-based workforce.  The "Turkers’ transcribe the image of the business card into usable data and then submit that information back to the users’ CardLasso account.  At this point, the user can choose to receive the contact’s information as a vcard, in a csv file, or have the information sent directly to a specified Salesforce CRM org.

The uniqueness of the application is the number of web services it uses.  Here’s a quick summary:

1. iPhone – use the iPhone camera to capture the business card images
2. Adobe Flex – alternatively, take a picture of the business card with your webcam using an Adobe Flex interface that controls the webcam on your PC
3. Adobe AIR – or, if you don’t have an internet connection, Adobe AIR takes the webcam photo capture module offline
4. Force.com Sites – from salesforce.com, Force.com Sites runs to entire process.  A user’s account information is stored on Force.com and integrates with all other components of the application
5. Finally, Amazon Web Services drives all of the image processing.  Amazon S3 assists with storing the images, EC2 helps to process and store the image, Dev Pay enables payment for the monthly transcription servces, and finally Mechanical Turk physically enables the transcription of the business cards.

You may be saying that this is a complicated way of getting something done, but its actually the new reality.  All of these tools have extremely accessible API’s that make integration easy, enabling it to take the best technologies in Cloud Computing to create an application that bests the others in its market.  

If your interested in checking it out, just take a look at www.cardlasso.com.

 

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