On the Road with a Fujitsu Digital Nomad

What are the pre-requisites that make a digital nomad?  If I were to pull together a list, I’m sure I could cross them all off.   I’ve surrendered to the digital world and am at the mercy of my laptop, blackberry, wireless card and mobile scanner.

I work in sales, for Fujitsu actually, and as the Business Development Manager for the ScanSnap product line.  While I’m travelling all over the world to different shows and customer sites, I’m performing thousands of product demonstrations of the S300 and the new S1500 as part of my job.  Most people try to keep their job at the office, but I utilize ScanSnap for my own professional and personal benefits.

They say practice what you preach-and I do.  At work, I use the ScanSnap to scan customer contracts to email, scan business cards that I’ve collected on the road, and tackle the tedious process of filing expense reports.   While traveling I use the mobile S300 to scan my receipts and email them to our accounting team.  It saves money on shipping costs and quickly gets me reimbursed from out of pocket expenses.

Beyond using ScanSnap as my professional companion, it’s also inched its way into my personal life. As the top “chef” in my family (and that’s not saying too much in my family), I’m often tasked with the responsibility of cooking when I’m not on the road. Because my wife subscribes to every known magazine, I inevitably come across a recipe that looks good and secretly rip the page out to scan it into my own little digital recipe folder. I use a product called Recollect Desktop that allows me to automatically save recipes as a PDF image into my digital recipe book on my computer. I then use Recollect to search any document or recipes I have scanned. Whenever I need something quickly, I simply right click the Recollect desktop icon in the menu bar of my computer and select “Find.”

What’s more, I don’t even have to know how to spell correctly (that’s a whole other issue). For example, the other night I wanted to make chicken cacciatore and having absolutely no idea how to spell cacciatore, I spelled it phonetically – “Catchatore.” Of course, I didn’t get a hit so I slid Recollect’s patented fuzzy search bar to around 60% and was then given two options. I select page one of a two page document, and voila, I have chicken cacciatore!

These are just a few of the things I do while on the road and when switching gears at home. I’m sure there are many other road warriors out there with their own digital companions. We’ll keep providing tips and ideas on how you can be as productive as possible on the road or at home, so come back and visit.

For more information on Recollect, click here.

Doug Cripps, Business Development Manager
Fujitsu Computer Products of America