Paper business cards? Give me something to work with!
May 21, 2012 7:19 AM   Subscribe

Business cards circa mid-2012 - giving out paper business cards still seems necessary in most networking circles, but there's got to be a way of organizing the data in a useful matter... Right? Bonus points if it can interface with an iPhone and iPad.

I have hundreds of business cards. Paper cards don't age too well, of course, and I'd love to find a way to digitize the ones still useful / up-to-date... There's got to be a way. Looking on the App Store, I see a few apps that OCR cards to contacts, but the effective ones cost 'credits' (e.g. the more you need the more you end up paying). The solution, I suspect, is partly human-based, partly-computer based.

So what's your technique? There's a stack of a dozen collected over the last week alone...
posted by chrisinseoul to Computers & Internet (7 answers total) 13 users marked this as a favorite
 
To avoid collecting business cards in the first place, the bump app is awesome.
posted by three blind mice at 7:27 AM on May 21, 2012


I know some folks who use WorldCard Mobile and love it.
posted by cmchap at 7:30 AM on May 21, 2012 [1 favorite]


Circa 2009, I was asked by my boss to scan all his cards so he could keep them as jpgs.

I was working in an art department at the time, so I used our flatbed scanner to scan 10-12 at a time, brought the resulting HUGE jpg into photoshop, and cropped them out into 10-12 separate manageable jpgs.

That doesn't help with data management, though, because it's still just an image of text. I suppose you could use the text capture function on some scanners to create a .pdf with manipulatable text.

Or you could always... manually enter the information into vcard format. Slow, but anything that's functional probably will be slow in one way or the other (all that scanning and cropping wasn't exactly quick, either).
posted by Sara C. at 7:48 AM on May 21, 2012


I use Evernote. I just photograph the card using my smartphone and Evernote stores and OCRs it automatically. Easy.
posted by Nick Jordan at 7:50 AM on May 21, 2012 [4 favorites]


Where do you want to put the data? Do you want images of all the cards? Do you want them OCRed? Should the software automatically recognise certain fields? Should the OCRed output get into your address book?

Try CamCard on Android. See if it does what you want.
posted by devnull at 7:53 AM on May 21, 2012


I've been using an app called CardMunch on my iPhone, which is owned by LinkedIn. They've got some kind of mechanical turk setup on the backend so that you take a photo of a person's card and get contact details back. It can be set to import directly into your address book.

It works well.
posted by hwickline at 8:16 AM on May 21, 2012 [1 favorite]


CamCard is available for iPhone, too. It's been highly recommended, but I haven't actually used it myself yet.
posted by DaveP at 4:50 PM on May 21, 2012


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