If you’re like most people you have top desk drawer chock full of business cards that you’ve collected at conferences and other business meetings.
Of course you’ve collected them with the best intentions of manually entering them one-after-another into your computer – but somehow they sit unentered in that top drawer. Someday when you have extra time you’ll sit down and enter them all into your computer.
At last there’s a cheap and easy solution to automatically enter the information on most business cards to your computer.
If you have an iPhone 3GS there’s a new inexpensive software application called Business Card Reader from Shape Services that you should try.
For only $5.99 you can download it to your iPhone 3GS (other versions are supported but because the 3GS has a higher resolution auto-focus camera this is the preferred model).
Use the application to take a picture of a business card.
Here’s a really lousy sample of a business card from a prospective client that I collected about a year ago. I took this picture with my iPhone 3GS in the dim light of my kitchen.
And unbelievably this $5.99 program transcribed the business card perfectly.
In this instance the contact phone, address and email were all exactly as they should have been – despite having been capture off a dimly lit photograph of a business card. Total time from image to transcription? About a minute.
Certainly in many instances you might have to tweak the final address if the program doesn’t read the information perfectly.
Total time from taking the image to having a new contact in my iPhone? About a minute.
Because I use Google Apps for my email and contact management I am also able to use the free iPhone GoogleSync program to automatically synchronize contacts off the iPhone directly to my Google Apps account.
The end result is a business card accurately scanned from any iPhone 3GS into your iPhone contact database. If you are synchronizing that data to Google Apps then the contact information will also synchronize in real time.
Recommended.
[Business Card Reader] (iTunes link)
