First world countries would sell and disseminate information. Second tiered countries would deal in the distribution and sale of material goods. And third world would be solely manufacturing.
Obviously, if you are in one of the first world countries, organizing your information has become more important than ever before. Exchanging business cards is the common way to network. But now, you are inundated with sometimes hundreds of cards. Do you want to carry about a ledger of cards? NO! Well…there's an app for that.
"If you live an active business and social life, contact partners, conduct negotiations, make business deals, you usually exchange business cards. Eventually you get tons of business cards and it becomes difficult to store them, search and remember important contacts. Now you can scan them to your iPhone … just take a look at one of the best iPhone business card scanner apps!
"Business Card Reader (US$5.95) scans and 'reads' the picture using ABBYY's text recognition technology and enters the data into appropriate fields of the iPhone address book."
OK, high expectations. Does it deliver?
The Juice
BCReader is a very complex piece of software made user friendly. First, you take a picture of the business card from within the app. After you are satisfied that you have a legible picture, the software then performs a scan of that card. Once finished, the information is placed into appropriate fields (name, phone number, URL, etc.). Lastly, the card's information is placed into a virtual wallet.
The Pulp
BCReader is a time saving tool. It does not provide 100% accuracy, but for $5.99 who's to complain? If you have to do some tweaking of some of the information, so what? BCReader has done the bulk of the work for you.
I tried several types of business cards with the app. Naturally, visually uncluttered cards faired the best. So, I upped the stakes and ran a business card with several addresses, emails, phone numbers, etc. Even though it had a font size of probably 10 points, it did remarkably well, correctly importing about 75%-80% of the information. As you would expect, using a card with more graphic elements didn't fair as well, but still achieved about accurate recognition factor of approximately 50%. And handwriting recognition is out of the question.
The Rind
Nothing that I would call a deal breaker. And certainly nothing that can't be honed in future releases.
Summary
Another low price no brainer for the business person or anyone who that networks regularly. And the fact that it places all of the information in its proper fields and then keeps your information on file is pure icing on the cake.
If you belong to any business networks, this app is an absolute must. I can't imagine that you would be disappointed.
Macsimum rating: 8 of 10
©2010 Frank Petrie
