If you go to trade shows or conferences, you undoubtedly collect a boatload of business cards. If you are like most, they get the rubber-band treatment and they then occupy some drawer space. It’s just too much pain putting them in your computer…or is it? World Card Link Pro just made it as quick as anything I’ve tried.
World Card Link Pro is a combination of hardware and an iPhone app that makes quick work of scanning and adding your business cards into your contact list. The hardware holds your iPhone and a business card at parallel angles, enabling you to scan business cards as quick as you can swap them out. Its autofocus mode means that every time you drop down a new card, the camera takes a picture. This is called “DOCK” mode and it’s blazing fast.
With built in OCR capabilities, it then reads the card, tries to decide where all the appropriate fields are and populates a new record for each card. You can then import into Google contacts or Outlook. You can also sync and back up your contacts in iCloud or Dropbox. The app then keeps a photo of the card, so you can always refer back to it if needed.
The photo is key, because there are things that OCR rarely handles properly. Some of those include:
· Very tiny type sizes
· Graphic representations of logos
· Cards with a photo background
· Business names that look like Web addresses (i.e. Something.com)
Given that warning, let’s look at how World Card Link Pro did with this problematic card .
It missed the company name (DougBardwell.com) and couldn’t separate the two first names from the last name. (Haven’t found one yet that would.) I do like that it surmised that the email and address were “work” addresses instead of the default “home” addresses that Google likes to default to.
While I’ve used other “human” transcription services that were more accurate, I never knew when I was going to get my scans back. With World Card Link Pro, the results are instantaneous. If I was at a trade show, I could do follow-up letters the very evening I received the cards with no problem. Priceless.
The software has some other neat features including email signature recognition. When you receive an email with someone’s detailed email signature, simply copy the signature before closing the email. Go over to the World Card Link Pro app and hit “SIGNATURE.” Then, merely paste the info and World Card Link Pro will assign a new record for you. Hit “add to contacts” and you’ve got a new record
If you travel, you’ll also appreciate that the app recognizes multiple languages: English, French, German, Italian, Spanish (Spain/Mexico), Dutch, Portuguese (Portugal/Brazil), Japanese, Traditional/ Simplified Chinese, Korean, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, Russian, Polish, Turkish, Hungarian, Greek, Czech, and Slovak
Forget to take the hardware component with you? No problem. Just touch “CAMERA” and you can hand hold the phone to grab a business card’s information any time someone hands one to you
It’s not the most accurate OCR I’ve seen, but its real strength is speed. Literally, you could scan a hundred business cards in about six minutes. That’s pretty amazing. Add another six minutes to confirm the correctness of the OCR and you’ve got a huge job done in less than fifteen minutes
Read more about World Card Link Pro at their website. With their 30 day money back guarantee, you owe it to yourself to give it a try.
Doug Bardwell , based in Cleveland, OH, writes about interesting new travel technology topics, across the country and around the world at DougBardwell.com . Feel free to drop him a line at travel.dougbardwell@gmail.com with suggestions for future products to be reviewed. If you've ever used one of the products he's reviewed, please leave your thoughts in the comment box below. To get his stories delivered to your inbox, click the RSS feed or the "Subscribe" button above or follow him on Facebook , Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ . To read Doug’s disclosure notice, click here .
via Examiner National Edition Gadgets & Tech Channel Articles http://www.examiner.com/article/world-card-link-pro-for-fast-business-card-scanning?cid=roadrunner