Business Card reader – WorldCard Mobile

April 3rd 2011

In the business world you can live and die by your network of contacts and for decades the pivot point has been the humble business card. Trade shows, meetings, presentations the age old phrase “do you have a card” echo’s halls, boardrooms, and cafes around the world.

If you’re like me you’ve always got someone elses card stuffed in your pocket.  They pile up in drawers, gather dust in card holders and roladexes, or get transcribed into a multitude of systems and applications where they remain accurate and current for periods of decades or a few seconds depending on your industry.

What to do with them?  I find the iPhone address and keyboard fiddly and difficult to use.  Whilst the opposable thumb I’ve inherited has allowed me to evolve thus far I am nowhere near as adept as my kids and their peers.  Thumbs a blur as they flash across the on-screen keyboard.  Not mine.

So when I got the opportunity to look at the WorldCard Mobile business card reader I was intrigued and a little excited.  Perhaps finally something that would render the need for continually filing and weeding out business cards?

The app itself has a clear and easy to use interface with just a few buttons that anyone could use.

Perhaps the buttons could have been larger and the graphic smaller.  I generally find myself fishing around for the right area to hit, but never mind.

Lining up the card is a breeze, and there is even an anti-shake option which is really useful.

The icon in the middle of the screen tells you when you’re in focus, snap and you’re away.

Once taken, you are presented with an image of the card and all that’s left is to hit the “Recognise” button and you’re done.

Almost instantly you are presented with a form similar to the iphone contacts app filled with what the OCR has translated from the image.  First time off I was astounded that it even worked at all.  Blown away in fact.

Phone numbers, email addresses, website URLs.  How does this thing work?

It missed a few characters, to be expected.  You can either edit them manually or you can review the image and drag a selection marque and select re-recognise so that the OCR can have another go.

My experience was that, unless it missed it completely which it did on a couple of occasions, re-recognise doesn’t do any better just because you manually selected an area, sometimes it did worse.

Once you’re done, tap EXPORT and lo and behold there is your contact in the Apple Contacts app.  Magic.

Courtesy Penpower Technology Limited

Received an email you want to put in there?  No problem.  Simply highlight and copy the email address in the email to the clipboard then swap to the WorldCard Mobile app and tap the SIGNATURE icon.

Follow the same procedure as for the card and – bang – away you go.

Just want to keep the card?  No problem, WorldCard Mobile keeps the image (unless you select otherwise in Settings) and you can use a cover flow view to flip through the card stack.  I’m not sure how much space a multitude of cards takes up.  Perhaps I’ll take a few and see how big the app gets.

I even took a photo of a signature block from someone else’s email on their screen and ran the OCR over that and it worked a treat.

Got the feeling this isn’t going to end well?  You’re probably right.

That this app works at all is amazing.  It is fast and, on average, I got what I would estimate as an 80% accuracy.

Of the 20 or so cards, emails, and signatures that I tested this with I had 2 complete failures where less than 10% accuracy.  From a productivity perspective I wasted about 20 minutes dragging, re-recognising, and generally trying to make it work.  I should have just typed it in.

Admittedly, the card were from design studios and were low contrast, multi-coloured, and custom typeface heavy but such is life

I had a complete failure working with two-sided cards.  I read and re-read the instructions in the help to no avail. Again I wasted about 30 minutes trying to get info from both sides into one record until I gave up and typed it in.  I guess I could have merged the record but fatigue had set in and I was feeling to bruised to be clever anymore.

Obviously, lighting has big part to play in the accuracy but don’t expect 100% it is going to be the exception.

Courtesy Penpower Technology Limited

For those of you with the luxury of a personal assistant (do we still have those?) you can buy a desktop appliance from WorldCard and have someone else do it for you. There’s an ad in the help if you are interested.

For the rest of us perhaps a photo is good enough.

The question is: how much longer will the business card survive?  With Linkedin now the preferred mechanism for business connectivity and its bump (In Person) technology I’m finding people are gravitating toward keeping that information in the cloud so you can access it from any device, not just your iPhone.

With the iPhone 5 expected to have an NFC (Near Field Communication) chip, perhaps we’re close to having an electronic business card.  Imagine being at a conference and broadcasting your business details for anyone to grab, or searching for people you know in the crowd in a foursquare manner.

The business card will stay around for a while, and whilst it does this is as good an app as you are going to find if not best of breed, but I question whether you’d be better using technology or just typing the details in.  Not as cool an activity but from an opportunity cost perspective, probably more productive and efficient.

Try it for free as a Lite Version before you commit to buy.  There are 62 business card apps (9 from WorldCard) so shop around.  Lite version restricts the number of cards you can download to the Contacts app, otherwise they are the same.

What I Liked:

- Fast, very fast
- Reasonably accurate (80% mostly)
- Card view option with cover flow if you like cards
- Email capture faster than cut and paste
- Not tested, but comes in many language options including Russian, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Latin (Portuguese, Spanish), and English as individual purchases
- Lite (free versions) available for all languages

What I didn’t Liked:

- Two-sided didn’t work for me at all (I tried, I really tried)
- Merging with existing Linkedin Contacts replaced existing portraits with an image of the business card – pointless and annoying
- Things it should have recognised and inexplicably wouldn’t

Verdict

Ease of Use: 3.5
Cost: 3.5
Help: 4
WOW factor: 4

WorldCard Mobile - $7.99

WorldCard Mobile, the leading business card scanning application for iPhone.  With a simple click of the camera, you no longer have to manually input contact info from business cards or email signatures.  Lite Version Here.
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Other iphone App options (not tested):
Business Card Reader:                   $1.19
ScanBizCards:                                    $8.99 (Lite version available)
ABBYY Business Card Reader:      $5.99 (Lite version available)