DEMO: Rocky Mountain Ventures’ Flip-Pal and Capture-ID make mobile scanning a reality

Rocky Mountain Ventures is one of 70 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2010 event taking place this week. These companies do pay a fee to present, but our coverage of them remains objective.

For some reason, photo and document scanners haven’t really changed much over the past decade. They’ve gotten cheaper and higher in quality, but they’re still generally clunky machines that need to be attached to computers.

Rocky Mountain Ventures is aiming to revitalize the scanning industry with its new mobile scanners, the consumer-focused Flip-Pal, and the Capture-ID for business users. Both devices are portable, allowing users to bring them to documents, instead of laying items on large flatbed scanners, and offer the ability to store documents and images on memory cards.

The company sees the Flip-Pal as something photo hobbyists and scrapbookers would appreciate. It can scan photos up to 4 by 6 inches at a resolution of 600 dots per inch. Users can scan photos as they would on a normal flatbed, but they also have the option to remove the lid and bring the scanner to photos — something that’s particularly useful for fragile and older photos. The company calls this technique “flip-and-scan.”

The Capture-ID is larger than the Flip-Pal, and more suited to document scanning. About the size of a netbook, it can scan images up to 5.5 by 7.5 inches, save them in PDF and JPEG formats. A larger version of the device, dubbed the Capture-Page, offers a 8.5-by-11.4-inch scanning area for letter-sized pages. Both devices are capable of scanning close to the binding of a book, a feature dubbed “scan-into-binding” by the company.

All of Rocky Mountain Venture’s products use SD memory cards. They’re also compatible with Eye-Fi SD cards, which add GPS information to photos and allow users to wirelessly sync files to their computers.

Rocky Mountain Ventures is competing with current scanning heavyweights like HP, Epson, and Brother — but its scanners remain unique as mobile solutions. Its innovation have landed two patents, with three more pending.

The Rocky Mountain, Colorado company was founded by entrepreneur Gordon Nuttall in 2009. It has raised $225,000 from Colorado residents.

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