Business cards are a fact of life in the business world. In the future we may all be carrying smart phones and using Bump to swap details, until then we still carry small pieces of cardboard with us. A reality that seems ridiculous when our contact list is completely electronic. So how do we bridge the gap between these two worlds ? Most of us manually enter details from the business card into our phones, then ditch the card.
WorldCard Mobile is an iPhone application that allows you to take a photo of a business card, that photo is then analysed using optical character recognition, then that data is paired with new contact fields. This is designed to save you time, manually inputting Name, Business, Address, Phone, Fax, Email and Website. So it sounds great in theory, but how well does it actually work ?
Below are two attempts at using the app to interpret the business card info. The first time missed a bunch of the data and got the Surname very wrong. The second attempt yielded much better results.
After extensive testing the app does an ok job, but far from perfect. There’s often information captured that ranges from a few wrong characters to complete garbage in fields. Admittedly the app has a hard job given the large variances in business cards layouts.
Overall the app gives you a great head start at converting analogue information to digital data. From there you will likely need to fix any mistakes, but overall the time spent should be less than entering manually. As to wether that time savings is worth the A$7.99 for the app, that’s a question you’ll need to answer.
There are other competitors in this space such as Business Card Reader which also sell for A$7.99. Results using that app are very similar to WorldCard.
More information @ PenPowerInc
Get the app @ iTunes
