I have to say, the geek in me is most excited today.
Those that have heard me speak over the years may recall that I often retell the story of a pharmaceutical company I was consulting with on a patent & trademark-focused ECM project. In defining their overall ECM strategy I proposed that they keep content independent of application – object-orientation if you will. The benefit I explained was that as content types came and went they could be easily plugged into the ECM applications. (This is the beauty of a well defined ECM strategy. It is content-type agnostic and thus scalable.) In an effort to inspire and rally the staff of techies and attorneys I gave examples of how applications initially executed on document images could be migrated to include XML “live” files and audio files. I then introduced the concept of olfactory data – or digitized scent. (As I stated in my first posting to this blog, The C in ECM – content is a very broad term. Anything that can be captured and “replayed” is content. ECM is not just about paper versus images, but paper AND images and structured data, web pages/html, XML files, e-mails, recorded audio (e.g. digitized recorded customer support phone calls), video (e.g. training applets) and – yes odors.)
When I was working with the pharmaceutical company – some 15 odd years ago, digitized scent was a focus in the content world. Companies like Digiscent (now hosting a great blog on the subject), and TriSenx were focused on techniques for “digitizing” smell and making it yet another digital data type. For whatever reason, interest and market pick-up waned. Well, the reality of smelly documents may be back. Today I read, with great excitement that the Gene Wilder Movie, "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” is being re-released with Smell-O-Vision technology (article). That’s right – can’t you just smell that chocolate river now.
With any luck, this will be another case where the business content industry is led by the entertainment industry. The application of olfactory data in a business ECM system seems virtually endless and powerful to me. Imagine embedding smell in marketing brochures, or being able to patent an odor and use it to market products to the visually impaired (an attorney at the pharmaceutical company came up with that one – a great idea.)
So what’s next – digi-taste Yeah – stay tuned, apparently printers that can reproduce lickable-tasteable “documents” are in development mode. God I love ECM – its so cool.
