I’ve been waiting for technology to solve the business card problem. You know, the one where you collect business cards at an event, file them carefully in a special yellow folder, and then, hey presto… you’ve got a special yellow folder full of business cards.
I told myself I’d sit down one day and type them into Address Book. I even looked online to see if there was a consumer-grade service where you could ship a batch to India or China and have them entered for you. And a little while ago I downloaded something from the App Store to my iPhone called ScanBizCards which I’ve used once or twice, but never really systematically. It looks a bit inelegant, frankly, alongside other apps.
So I was actually mildly interested when the people behind WorldCard Mobile got in touch through the blog with a free download of their app (£3.49 from the App Store) designed for iOS4 and the better cameras in iPhone 4s. I installed it today, and snapped a couple of cards.
You can see the basic approach in the screenshots. Snap a picture (actually, hold the phone about 6 inches above the card and hold very, very still) then the app tries to OCR the card, and shows you what it thinks the various fields map to. To be fair, that’s a tough job, given the variety of business card styles and fields, and it makes a good fist of it. You can tidy up its mistakes manually, and then click Export, where it saves it to your phone’s Contacts (and from there, hopefully, syncs to your computer and MobileMe). There’s a nice little trick which lets you copy an email signature on the phone, and have that parsed in the same way as a business card, letting you add it to your Contacts easily.
I’m not sure it’s the kind of app to really blow you away, but it’s nippy, works quite well (as long as you can hold the phone still) and feels like reasonable value. But more importantly, it will hopefully let me bin those bits of card collected so dutifully and filed so carefully and actually communicate with some of those people.
