A little while back I was doing a gig for a gentleman very familiar with patent trolling. He was constantly digging at me to deliver him ideas, ideas that could be produced into a consumer product. Being accustomed to solving logic based problems through software, it was to be an interesting task. To make a long story short, one of the ideas both he and I prefered was a small desktop device that would:

1) Accept receipts, business cards, scraps of paper with a recipe, any paper within certain dimensions into a double sided scanner, which would scan and OCR

2) Temporarily store OCR information to internal cache, and triple check consistency of reaped data. Snapshot would be sent to a workstation client, which in turn would request confirmation from a user that all data was acquired. Once confirmed, the "machine" would transfer scraps of paper to a shredder device that would then permantely destroy original copy

3) Share data to Personal Information Datastore and link back to electronic reproduction.

Unfortunately, this idea was never followed up on, heck it wasn't even patented (Want to make it happen, let me know!).

Today I read about Intuit's launch of their 2007 version of Quicken personal finance package, which they tout as a virtual file cabinet.

"The ability to easily download or scan important financial documents and create a permanent digital archive inside Quicken makes perfect sense to people and will certainly help them locate these documents at tax time or years later if audited."

I certainly hope this is an attempt towards something resembling my idea. To be free from all of these pesky little papers that I seem to amass on a daily basis, would be a welcome blessing.