For many business people, especially those in sales or executive positions, contacts can make or break an opportunity, job, or career.   However, as technologically advanced as our workplaces have become, we still rely on old-school business cards to exchange most contact information — and then rely on technology to try to make the whole process […]
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Review: Business Card Reader for iPhone/iPod Touch

Nov 29th 2009 by

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For many business people, especially those in sales or executive positions, contacts can make or break an opportunity, job, or career.   However, as technologically advanced as our workplaces have become, we still rely on old-school business cards to exchange most contact information — and then rely on technology to try to make the whole process manageable.

PC-based business card scanning solutions (such as my favorite, CardScan) convert a printed business card into an online contact via Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and are generally quite accurate, saving substantial amounts of time that would ordinarily be spent keying in names, titles, phone numbers, email addresses, and more.

Now Shape Services has introduced Business Card Reader for iPhone and iPod Touch.  Can a $5.99 app be as accurate as a solution such as CardScan that at best costs well over a hundred dollars?  In this review, I put it to the test.

INTRODUCTION

030 The premise of Business Card Reader is simple: Use the iPhone ‘s camera to acquire an image of a business card (or use a saved image, which is also the only option for the iPod) which is then scanned for text that is intelligently interpreted as a name, phone number, email address, etc.   These fields then populate a new contact entry (or are merged into an existing one), which makes that contact available for calling, emailing, etc “ all without having to enter the data in manually.

I tested the app with an iPhone 3GS, which, because of the auto-focusing camera, does not require an additional eternal lens as the iPhone 2G or 3G would.  I scanned ‘normal ‘ business cards and more exotically styled ones; plain English and mixed-language; one color and multi-color.

ACCURACY

The name of the game with any OCR application is accuracy, as more errors require more manual editing that increasingly negates the timesaving benefit of scanning.  Accuracy in this type of application can be described in two categories: Text Recognition (accurately determining text from the image) and Field Recognition (recognizing what is an email address and what is a name, for example).

In my tests, Business Card Reader did a good (but certainly not perfect) job of recognizing text.   Much of this could directly be tied to the one flaw in the process “ the human one.   With a desktop business card scanner, the card is brought in and scanned in perfectly straight orientation with perfect and even light.   However, taking a picture of a card with an iPhone introduces the error-inducing components of tilted perspective, uneven or inadequate light, and shaking.   No matter what card, what lighting, and how still we held the iPhone, I could not get 100% accurate text recognition “ but I came darned close.    It is absolutely necessary to provide a good environment to achieve a good quality image; and therefore a good scan.   I found it easiest with overhead lighting to prop the card up on a mug, book, or some other object and shoot the picture with the iPhone held such that the side was resting on the table in front of it.  This technique both eliminated the shadows that would have occurred had I tried to shoot it from overhead and also helped to stabilize the phone to eliminate shaking. 

032Field Recognition was less accurate.  Even with good text recognition on a given card, errors slipped in.  The card pictured to the left had the notation ‘(Office) ‘ after the phone number, and it was picked up as part of the number, as shown.   On another card, the notation ‘Cell “ 24×7 ‘ before the number was also interpreted as part of the number ( ‘247 ‘ was prepended to the actual number), each time requiring manual edits.   Contacts with either a salutation ( ‘Mr. ‘ or a military rank such as ‘1Lt ‘) or a middle name/initial in their name were consistently misinterpreted with the last name being discarded and the remaining two portions of the name used as the first and last names.   These are the types of errors that CardScan rarely (if ever) makes.

 

CONCLUSION

Despite the recognition bugs, Business Card Reader is a solid app that will undoubtedly save lots of time over manually entering business cards and can provide a better solution for those tempted to drag a business card scanner along with them on the road.   The LinkedIn Lookup feature was handy, although the ‘Save Link ‘ feature inexplicably saved the LinkedIn URL as a work URL instead of ‘Other ‘ or adding/choosing ‘LinkedIn ‘.

While there is a learning curve required to take good quality images, the use of a photo app that either permits the use of the full screen as a shutter button or takes the photo automatically when it senses that the iPhone is not shaking should yield much more reliable OCR results.   

Does it beat a PC based card scanner?    In my opinion, it does “ the inaccuracies are more than outweighed by the substantially lower price and convenience factors “ unless you have a ton of business cards stashed away in shoeboxes where mass iPhone scanning would be too impractical.   But for those of us with the need to snap a few cards per day, it has the (as yet unrealized) potential to relegate the old business card scanner to the Ebay pile.

Business Card Reader is available in the App Store for $5.99; however, absent fixes for the noted issues, I have difficulty giving a wholehearted recommendation at this time.  However, just as this review was initially being published, Shape Services released an update that fixed another bug that had been noted (and has now been removed from the review) “ so I will say that it should be strongly considered by those who need to scan business cards on the go; those who tend to wait to get back from a business trip and scan the accumulated collection or those who will be frustrated by the requisite manual editing should either wait for future updates or consider a PC-based system.

Shape Services provided a promo code to Just Another iPhone Blog for the review of Business Card Reader. For further information regarding our site ‘s review policies, please see the ‘About ‘ page.

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