Oliver Starr at MobileCrunch has a long and excellent writeup on ScanR, a new free service that allows you to take a camera phone picture (or any digital picture) and turn it into a searchable PDF file. If you have a camera phone with at least one megapixel of resolution, ScanR is great for turning things like whiteboard images and paper drawings into something more usable. This is particularly interesting for heavy travellers who do not have a scanner handy.

To use it, you simply take a picture and email it to scanr. They supply you with an enhanced pdf version by email.

The company recently announced a $4.65 million Series A round of funding from Trinity Ventures and Thomvest International.