Does dad have a 10 foot tall stack of business cards piled high on hist desk? Maybe it is a trash bag full of them for the last conference he attended. If dad needs someones number does he go digging through a box full of cards?
Stop the insanity!!
Dad already has an iPhone right? Sure he does! The iPhone is a great way to store contacts but inputing them off of business cards is a PITA that no one wants to do. Along comes a great solution, Scanbizcards for the iPhone.
Note: I was given a free copy of this software for review. Below is my honest feedback on the product.
ScanBizCards works by taking a picture of the business card using the iPhones built in camera and using OCR technology to extract the person details from the card. When it works you don’t have to type anything in and you have the persons contact information imported into your iPhone.
My experience with Scanbizcards has been pretty good so far. It is not perfect but I think it is going to be hard to be perfect given the huge variety of business card designs and styles out there. It worked best on plain looking business cards like this one.
I blurred out the contact details on purpose. 
As you can see it got the name and title correct. There is a small miss on the company name and your going to have to trust me when I say that it got the phone numbers and email correct. This was the best card out of about 10 I tried, that I got. The more ornate or non-standard a card was, the worse it got.
Lighting also plays a huge part in getting a good scan. In my office, which has terrible lighting, the OCR hit rate was not as good. At my desk at home, which has better lighting, the OCR hit rate was much higher. The ScanBizCards folks say this is the most important variable when getting a good OCR read of a card and my experience bears this out.
Bottom line, the best $6 you can spend to get that pile of cards off your desk and into your iPhone. While not perfect it sure as heck beats putting them all in by hand.
Now you can get a copy of ScanBizCards for free! Leave a comment on this post and I will pick 3 people at random to get codes for a free copy of ScanBizCards. The drawing will be held Friday June 11th 2010 at noon PST. Good luck!
