Xerox brings customers into research process with new website

4 Mar 2011

NORWALK, US: Xerox has created a website to encourage customers to play a part in the exploratory research that serves as a source for new products, applications and services.

Open Xerox is an online technology portal, providing instant access to the latest Xerox innovations and allowing anyone to test pilot technology and provide feedback directly to lab scientists and engineers.

"At Xerox we encourage change, push the limits of the unknown, and explore new approaches to innovation," says Rabin Ram, MD of the Xerox division at Bytes Document Solutions. "Collaboration with users across the globe brings fresh ideas, diverse opinions and expertise that enable game-changing innovations for our customers."

Open Xerox was co-created by researchers at Xerox Research Centre Europe and Xerox Research Centre Webster, and features projects developed at PARC, the Palo Alto Research Centre. Users can try the applications and register to access a wider range of technologies, run services and test technology integration in third-party applications.

"Open Xerox is a virtual research lab where anyone from customers and fellow technology experts to potential partners can participate in testing our technology," adds Ram.

Some services can be accessed direct from Xerox multifunction printers equipped with EIP, the Xerox Extensible Interface Platform. The site offers more than 20 services, some of which require a log-in, such as:

Trailmeme - A Web publishing technology, allows users to create and publish creative and personalised paths through digital content to tell a story.
Simple Personalised Imaging - Using a simple wizard interface, users load their photo into the software and select a location for text, shaping the text to the perspective of the objects in the photo, so that words appear to belong to the original image.
Linguistic technology - State-of-the art tools that will divide up document text into nouns, verbs and other parts-of-speech for advanced knowledge extraction.
Xeproc - Targeted at the software development community, this domain-specific language (DSL) can be used to build a wide range of applications based on document processing, including transformation from one format to another, information extraction, indexing and navigation.