Dealing with that mountain of business cards
As computers move beyond productivity enhancement to a more central role in business, we may sometimes overlook some of the common business activities that most of us don’t yet computerize. The exchange of business cards, for example, is an everyday occurrence for most of us, but few business people bother storing those cards in any kind of database more elaborate than a plastic card-file or Rolodex.
It’s probably no surprise that a number of enterprising companies have developed products that promise to help us deal with our stacks of cards. In this article, we’ll look at the best of these products with a critical eye, to help you determine whether they can help with the storage and retrieval of the sometimes-valuable data on all those business cards.
Because business cards are relatively standardized (usually consisting of a 2"x3.5" piece of card stock with the company name and logo, contact’s name, address, phone, fax and, increasingly commonly, a web site and/or email address), specialized scanners can usually extract this data with reasonable accuracy. In fact, there are several such scanners on the market. One of the best known is from Corex (www.corex.com). First released in Aug. 1995, the current release is known as CardScan Plus 300. Carrying a suggested retail price of US$299 (about US$226 street), the product is a hardware and software combo that consists of a small sheet-fed scanner (about 6"x4") that connects to your PC’s parallel port (sorry, Apple fans; there is no Mac version available). A pass-through port is included, for connecting other parallel devices (e.g., a printer), too. Be aware, however, that Zip drives or other devices connected to your parallel port may have – or cause -- problems when connected to the pass-through port on one of these scanners. In extreme cases, you may have to install a second parallel port in your PC system.
Once the unit is connected and the software is installed, you feed business cards into it one at a time. Actually, you don’t have to wait for a card to be fully processed before entering the next one; as each card moves through the sheet-fed unit’s straight paper path (collecting in a messy heap on the other side), you can feed in another one. Scans are completed in a matter of seconds, and the CardScan waits until you have finished feeding cards before it begins the more time-consuming task of converting the data on the cards into a text form that can be saved and searched with the system’s included Personal Information Manager (PIM) database. The latest software also works with third-party scanners compliant with the TWAIN standard. (TWAIN, believe it or not, is said to stand for “technology without an interesting name.”)
Once scanned, an included optical character recognition (OCR) program does a surprisingly good (though occasionally fallible) job at extracting the data and storing it in the appropriate fields of the system’s included contacts database. If you wish, you can export these records to other common data formats, for use in the database or PIM of your choice. We were able to easily synchronize data with a Palm Pilot handheld organizer using the program’s “HotSync” capability, or export our CardScan data in formats compatible with Lotus Organizer, Microsoft Outlook 97 or Symantec Act!, as well as GoldMine, Maximizer, SideKick and other contact managers.
It is also possible to send faxes directly from WinFax Pro or FaxWorks Pro using CardScan as your address book, or send the data to a word processor, such as Microsoft Word, to Mail Merge and create automatically addressed letters.
Pros: Inexpensive and compact solution to help you convert that mountain of old business cards into useful, searchable data.
Cons: Has a hard time with colored backgrounds, unusual fonts, some company logos. Parallel pass-thru may cause problems if attached through a ZIP drive, etc.
For more information: visit www.cardscan.com
Of course, the CardScan isn’t the only product of its kind. Palm Pilot fans will be heartened to know that Oct. 1998 is the expected release date of a new US$299 card-reading scanner especially for the Palm Pilot series. Dubbed CardJet, it clips right onto one of the Palm units and allows you to scan up to 200 cards at a time through a window on the back. Included software for Windows 95/NT allows the data to be HotSync’ed with a Desktop machine, and converters are supplied for exporting the data to popular scheduling programs such as Microsoft Outlook, Act!, Goldmine, and others.
The company claims the battery-operated unit delivers up to 70 hours of operation.
For more information: visit www.dynafirm.com/CardJet.htm
Another popular business card scanner is Seiko's Smart Business Card Reader (about US$199). The unit features a 400-dpi, 8-bit grayscale scanner and includes OCR software that transfer information from business cards into popular Windows 3.1 and 95 contact management programs like Act!, Maximizer, and PackRat. Note that, although recent revisions of this product claim to handle international cards from Germany, Canada, Australia, etc. correctly, it doesn’t do as good a job on Canadian postal codes as it seems to on ones from the U.S.
Contact: Seiko Instruments: www.seiko-instruments-usa.com
Other products
Electronic Document Technology offers the EDT Business Card Reader, a parallel-port business card scanner roughly comparable to the Corex CardScan. EDT supplies a freely downloadable trial version of the including Biz Card Manager 4.0 software at www.edti.com/download.htm#Download
For more information: visit www.edti.com
CompuStar’s Business Card Reader is yet another similar product. Details at http://www.fusing.com/html-e/product/bcr/open.html
Mac users: Umax (510/651-8883), EDT (408/733-7309) and La Cie (503/520-9000) all offered similar SCSI-based card scanners a few years ago, although we were unable to find references to these products in current product catalogs. Currently, Mac users are probably best served by a general-purpose OCR and scanned document management product such as Visioneer’s PaperPort, as seen at www.visioneer.com. The PaperPort system is also available for Windows-based PCs.
Conclusion
Dedicated card scanners aren’t as versatile as a general-purpose flatbed scanner, which you can now purchase for the same amount of money or less. However, the OCR software included with (and, in some cases, available separately from) the scanners from Corex and Seiko and others does a better job overall (given the inexactitudes caused by the boundless creativity of the world’s graphic designers) at getting the data from those cards in and out of your database and contact management applications. While we’d recommend seeing a unit and its software in action before plunking down your cash, or at least buying from a source with a generous return policy, we think business card scanners are well worth a look.
For Further Reading:
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