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Comment by pmjordan | Hacker News Reader

Photographing the whiteboard and emailing the photo(s) to everyone who was at the meeting is a great tool for remembering what was discussed and decided. I'm always surprised at how few people do it. If your whiteboard isn't big enough and you have to erase it halfway through, you do need the presence of mind to take a picture before rubbing it out. Leave the camera by the eraser.

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There's software to clean up these pictures (remove glare, correct perspective).

I've thought about software that goes further... I'm thinking for instance, vectorize the image, OCR the text, convert sloppily-drawn lines into actual arrows. Whiteboard-photo-to-Visio, so to speak. It won't be possible to do this fully automagically of course, because of bad clarity of writing and drawing, but a tool could be made that assists the user to do this rapidly. Not easy, but not undoable either.

Would you think there's actually a business for software that does this? Or is it just a silly geek "solution looking for a problem"?

At my last startup, I used to be a heavy user of "Whiteboard Photo" software, and I'd definitely pay for software that does what you suggest (assuming the right price/features/value proposition.)

Evernote doesn't go as far as you suggest but allows one to search for photographed words, which comes in handy.

To be perfectly honest, I can't see a use for it. You WANT to have it in handwriting because it reminds you who wrote what, which helps you remember what they said while writing it. Sure, you can't really show these things to outsiders, but I don't think automated tidying would help that much.

OCR would be useful for allowing you to search.

There's scanr.com, which was pretty good a few years ago.

For my mISV I wrote PhotoNote to clean up whiteboard images. I wrote it to scratch a personal itch, but I think it's useful and competitive in the market.

http://www.southwedgesw.com/photonote

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