Events

  • AASLH Annual Meeting

    September 10-11, 2008
    Rochester Convention Center
    Rochester, NY

  • Frankfurt Book Fair

    Frankfurter Buchmesse
    October 15 - October 19, 2008
    Frankfurt, Germany

  • GITEX

    October 19-23, 2008
    UAE
    Dubai International Convention and Exhibition Centre

  • GTEC 2008

    October 28-29, 2008
    Ottawa
    Westin Hotel
    Ristech Booth 1012

  • IMS Online

    December 2008
    London, UK

Moving Knowledge from Books to Bytes since 2001


Beginning At Venture

The story of Kirtas Technologies begins with its founder, Dr. Lotfi Belkhir.

While a principal of the Venture Lab at Xerox Corporation, Dr. Belkhir did extensive market research to investigate the practical potential for a truly automated book scanner.

The response was overwhelmingly positive. There were no viable products with automated page turning capability.

All existing book scanners were manual planetary systems that required a dedicated operator; and high-speed auto-feed devices were too destructive. This forced users to disbind, label, scan and then rebind books, a costly and time consuming process inappropriate as well for active collections, fragile or rare volumes.

Despite a successful proof of concept, in March of 2001 Xerox Corporation management for financial reasons decided to cancel funding for all non-core projects.

The Book Scanner project was one.

 

The Creation of Kirtas Technologies, Inc

"Kirtas and their partners have developed software applications that far exceed the capabilities of the competition in automated image acquisition, OCR conversion, enhancement, and indexing."

The decision gave Dr. Belkhir the opportunity to secure an exclusive license to the page turning technology he helped develop, and build a new company around it.

Mario Rosati, a corporate partner at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich and Rosati, the law firm that led the surge of California IPO’s during the 1990’s, was one of the first to urge Dr. Belkhir to seek an exclusive license from Xerox and start his own company.

Important engineering contributions from expert firms in the Rochester NY area helped Kirtas create an impressive hardware prototype.

It was decided that the new firm would be called Kirtas -- in part because the word is the Arabic term for 'scroll', one of the oldest means of preserving and transmitting knowledge known to man.

But the word is also an anagram for 'at risk'. And a strong motivating force behind the development of Kirtas' technologies and services was the awareness of how much human knowledge was in danger of being lost or isolated. In time traditionally bound books would discolor, crumble, and eventually turn to dust. The knowledge inside them would be gone forever unless some better form of preservation can be found.

And now it had been.

Since 2001, Kirtas has continually refined the technology that was the foundation of the original concept.

In tandem with engineering improvements to the hardware, Kirtas and their partners have developed software applications that far exceed the capabilities of the competition in automated image acquisition, enhancement, OCR conversion and indexing.

As a result, Kirtas has become the global leader that is enabling the massive, rapid and cost-effective transfer of knowledge from books to bytes.