In a landmark article, over a half century ago, Vannevar Bush envisioned a ?Memory Extender? device which he dubbed the ?memex?. Bush?s ideas anticipated and inspired numerous breakthroughs, including hypertext, the Internet, the World Wide Web, and Wikipedia. However, despite these triumphs, the memex has failed to live up to its potential in corporate settings. One reason is that corporate users often don?t have sufficient time or incentives to contribute to a corporate memory or to explore others? contributions. At FXPAL, we are investigating ways to automatically create and retrieve useful corporate memories without any added burden on anyone. In this talk we discuss ProjectorBox?a smart appliance for automatic presentation capture?and PAL Bar?a system for proactively retrieving contextually relevant corporate memories.

Despite a glut of presentation capture technologies, useful information passes through projectors everyday and is lost. ProjectorBox seamlessly captures high-resolution slide images, text, and audio by intercepting the video signal sent from laptops to projectors. We have explored applications in corporate memory, e-learning and real-time presentation enhancement.

PAL Bar is a contextual retrieval system for proactive resource discovery, connecting users to relevant documents, presentations and people. In its latest instantiation, PAL Bar provides access to seamlessly captured content, such as ProjectorBox presentations, leading to an end-to-end corporate memory system for seamless information capture and discovery.