Zehoo is a service that pulls users' digital documents into one unified inbox, allowing them to search, edit and share at will.
The service can be accessed via the Web or a mobile app and incorporates multiple input methods. At present, documents can be collected from DropBox, Gmail, fax or a device's camera, with Google Drive integration on the way.
Zehoo performs optical character recognition (OCR) on faxed documents and photographs, allowing users to run searches on a document's contents rather than just the title. The OCR also enables document editing, which is not possible when a document is in PDF or image format.
Zehoo is the brainchild of Robin Bayhack, a lawyer by trade, whose previous venture, Fax to E-mail, is based on a similar idea: bringing a physical document into the digital world.
"I always thought there was something more special happening here," he says. "You're taking a physical document and you're putting it into the physical realm, but you're putting it in an image that you can't do anything with and you're burying it in your mail."
So he developed a method of putting the document through an OCR server before sending it in an e-mail, which gave the recipient both the text and image versions of a document. The idea grew from there, however, as e-mail is only one mechanism of storage.
At the moment Zehoo's OCR capability is limited to faxed and photographed documents, but in future Bayhack intends to implement it on a wide range of documents. The challenges are twofold. Firstly, performing OCR on documents requires permissions from third-party cloud storage providers like DropBox and Google. Secondly, Zehoo cannot store documents without it getting very expensive, very quickly. Bayhack is testing solutions to these problems.
Other enhancements he hopes to make in the near future are making more document sources available and integrating intelligent recommendations based on document type, for instance, when Zehoo detects users have images in a folder somewhere, suggesting they might want to share them on social networks.
Zehoo is free to use, supported with contextual advertising (based on keywords detected in the documents). Bayhack hopes to introduce an enterprise version that can be tailored to an organisation's specific requirements and can allow for enhanced collaboration.
It is currently only available on the Web and on Android devices, but will soon be available on Apple and BlackBerry too.
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