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Scannable app supercharges Evernote scanning on the go
It's been a year since Evernote's Phil Libin (a/k/a TUAW's favorite CEO) responded to user criticism by vowing to double down on the quality and performance of the "outboard brain" cloud app's core functionality. Despite the occasional misstep, the company's managed to improve the basic Evernote platform while continuing to introduce new features, apps and brand extensions -- including a partnership with LinkedIn, expanding the Evernote Market and delivering all-new versions of the Evernote app for both the Mac and for iOS 8. Now the elephant factory has pushed its latest mobile app out of beta and into production. Scannable for iOS delivers quick and easy scanning to Evernote with a minimum of configuration. Whether you're snapping Post-It notes or capturing business cards, Scannable is intended to make it as fast as possible (and get it all into Evernote, of course). When you launch the Scannable app, the camera immediately begins looking for a "document" -- something vaguely rectangular that stands out against the background. As soon as it finds the edges and you hold still enough, a round countdown icon appears over the highlighted document onscreen; then, poof, it's scanned and saved. No shutter button needed! A simple timeline of past scans shows up for you to approve, share, export and upload as required, but you can set Evernote upload as the default/automatic action and the app will simply push your scans to the service. The edge detection, cropping and deskewing that Scannable does is quite impressive. I'm a fan of powerful document scanner apps like Jotnot which allow you to manually define the edges of a document, turning a rhombus into a nice rectangle; Scannable simply does this on its own, with no real intervention needed. Sometimes if there's a particularly dark top or bottom edge on a document it might overcrop a bit, but in most cases it's spot on. If a specific document proves too baffling for the edge checker, you can switch into manual targeting mode to capture whatever you need. Scannable goes beyond the iPhone's camera with its ability to remote-control the US$495 ScanSnap Evernote Edition sheetfed desktop scanner (a rebranded version of Fujitsu's well-reviewed ScanSnap iX500). If the phone and the scanner are on the same Wi-Fi network, you can walk up to the scanner, scan and then work with the results on your phone. I didn't have the chance to try out this feature, but in an office equipped with a ScanSnap EE it certainly seems like it would be a pleasant addition. The killer use case for Scannable, in my brief testing, is business card scanning. The last app I used consistently for scanning cards was LinkedIn's CardMunch, which shut down in May of last year (roughly simultaneous with Evernote's deal with LinkedIn). Now, by connecting a LinkedIn account to the Scannable app, you can power through a stack of business cards in seconds, with solid OCR and a very good hit rate for contacts connecting to their LinkedIn profiles. Evernote's standalone Hello app (for keeping track of who you meet and when you met them) does one-off business cards reasonably well, but Scannable is much faster for a bulk scanning job after a trade show or day-long meeting. Once they're scanned, it's one tap to save them into your iPhone's Contacts list. With Hello, Food, Skitch and the flagship Evernote app all offering various scanning capabilities into the Evernote ecosystem, not to mention all the third-party apps that support Evernote as a destination, users have nothing but choices when capturing a whiteboard, flyer or business card. Scannable's value is the streamlined, single-tasker approach it takes to getting things captured quickly and in a near-touchless manner. For that, it deserves a try-out spot on your homescreen.
Make a mess of your contacts with Business Card Reader Free
OCR - Optical Character Recognition is a very difficult thing to do right. Scanning pages of text can now be done fairly successfully, but business cards have always been a mess. Some are loaded with design elements, weird fonts, and non-standard placement of information. Business Card Reader Free is another attempt to do what might seem to be simple: use your iPhone's camera to easily import business card information into your contacts. The app requires iOS 7.0 or later and is compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. This app is optimized for iPhone 5. I tested it on iPhone 6 running iOS 8.02. The application is free, but limited and includes displays adds (and they're rather intrusive). I have a love/hate relationship with business cards. On one hand they can be beautiful and in the past, back when they were expensive to produce, they were a sign of credibility. Now anyone can print off a few hundred cards they designed for a few bucks. On the other hand business cards are annoying little slips of paper that seem to breed and multiply. I use to have binders full of cards, physical Rolodexs, and other file systems. I bought one of the first Palm devices (still called the "Palm Pilot" at that time), to try and organize my growing stack of business cards. Later I worked for a calendar and contact management software company and looked at a lot of scanning solutions. Very few proved to be any improvement or provide any time savings over simply keying them in yourself. Think about it. It might seem like scanning should save you time, but in fact there is really very little information on a business card. It doesn't take that long to just key one in. It's when you have a stack it seems intimidating. I tested out Business Card Reader Free on a variety of cards. I was unsurprised to find that it had difficulty with even the most basic of cards. When I scanned in a clean, simply designed card it still required that I edit the scanned text, an act that takes longer than simply typing it in. On the more exotic cards (and far too many people have ugly, over designed business cards) it couldn't make much sense out of the card at all. The app does have links to the built in Maps app, can send the imported data to Contacts, and can look to Facebook and Twitter for additional information. That's all nice, but if you can't manage the initial scanning, there's no point in the other features. Beyond that, the free version is severely crippled. You can purchase an "unlimited" one month trial for $2.99 per month or $19.99 per year. The paid premium account gives you unlimited scanning, gets rid of the adds, allows you to synchronize to card databases, and exports to Salesforce. You can also buy "recognitions" in lots for 50 for $4.99. You can also disable the adds for 99 cents. Don't waste your time with Business Card Reader Free. Just set aside your stack of cards and when you have a few minutes, type a few directly into your selected contact manager. You'll save yourself a lot of frustration and heartache.
LinkedIn and Evernote partner to make business cards useful again
Fact: everyone likes doing business with the guy who remembers them. With that in mind, LinkedIn and Evernote just announced a new partnership to bring the Rolodex into the 21st century, and it all starts with a photo of a standard business card. Evernote will instantly digitize it and bring in any relevant LinkedIn info. You're then given the option to connect with that CEO, secretary or digital prophet on LinkedIn or add their contact info to your address book. However, things get interesting as your business relationship blossoms. Over time, you can add things like audio from a meeting, documents, or even key emails with him or her to the card's page in Evernote.
Five apps for business card scanning
Persistent critters, those little analog cardboard rectangles. Even with the option to scan QR Codes, email vCards or bump phones to swap contact information, the venerable business card keeps on trucking -- and keeps on making it challenging to leap from analog to digital information. If your career or avocation takes you to meetings, trade shows or conferences, chances are you too have a pile of to-be-dealt-with business cards that could stand a good digital shakedown. Here's our five apps rundown of a few good choices for handling business card scanning on the go. SHAPE's Business Card Reader: Last year, we noted that the US$4.99 Business Card Reader expanded its offerings with an iPad version of the app. BCR delivers capable scanning and OCR (using libraries licensed from high-end scanning developer ABBYY, which has its own app suite as well), with a good verification step to make sure that the recognition is matching the actual card data. BCR can quickly export scanned data to your device address book, match LinkedIn connections, and in the latest version it hooks directly into the CRM tools of Salesforce.com for marketing and sales pros. Evernote Hello: I wasn't all that taken with the first version of Evernote's free meet-and-manage contact app; it was buggy, and it seemed awkward to ask a new acquaintance "Mind if I take your picture so I remember you?" Things have definitely changed for the better with January's version 2 release. In addition to manual entry and Hello-to-Hello audio contact sharing (very cool, I recommend giving it a try), the beautifully designed app now supports business card scanning -- temporarily free for both regular and premium Evernote users, although at some point down the road the regular user scan allowance may be curtailed or changed to IAP. Evernote's expertise with text recognition and knowledge of the iPhone's camera capabilities seems to have paid off, as Hello is now delivering some of the best and quickest scan results I've seen. My favorite feature is the heads-up display that automatically detects the card and gives you instant feedback on getting the best image ("use a shallower angle," "center the card," "hold the phone steady," etc.); as soon as Hello thinks it's got the shot, it captures the scan automatically. If it can't auto-detect, it falls back to manual mode, but most of the time with a light card on a dark background it nails it in one try. Within a few seconds, the data is detected, and if you're signed into LinkedIn via Hello, the card will be matched with that contact immediately. Hello also links a "meeting" note to give context to the encounter, rather than leaving a bare contact without metadata. Some minor quibbles aside (you can't edit the Hello notes in either the desktop or iOS versions of the regular Evernote app, for one), Hello is a winner. Without a firm date or pricing for the end of the free scan trial for non-premium Evernote users, my recommendation is to use it while you can. LinkedIn's CardMunch: With more than 2 million cards processed already, the free scanning app from your friendly neighborhood social network for professional use has simplicity and volume on its side. Assuming you already use LinkedIn's connection ecosystem, CardMunch's scanning speed and off-device processing make it great for dealing with a lot of cards in batch mode, and you can make notes on each scan before it's recognized on the back end. Of course, the trade-off of the cloud processing step is that you can't easily OCR cards on the plane on the way home without forking over for some WiFi. Also, checking for errors is a two-step process since the scan and the data return are a few minutes apart -- but CardMunch tends to make fewer mistakes than other apps, so that's not a big drawback. WorldCard Mobile: When I last checked out the $6.99 WCM app a year ago, it stood up well against competitors like CardMunch and BCR. Since then, the app has added QR Code scanning with support for both vCard and meCard formats, iOS 6 compatibility, support for double-sided cards, batch scanning, duplicate search and direct synchronization with Google contacts. WCM's interface is still in need of some redesign TLC, but for rapid and accurate scanning, it's a good choice. Note that WCM also requires you to tap a small button on the screen to take a card photo, while other apps let you tap the whole screen or auto-detect the card (Evernote Hello). NeatCloud and NeatMobile: If you're in the habit of keeping all your print-to-digital documents in the Neat ecosystem driven by one of the company's desktop scanners, you're already comfortable with the OCR and filing capabilities of the platform. What's new is that Neat is extending your scanned repository into the cloud and onto your iPhone, with the NeatMobile / NeatCloud combination app and service. NeatCloud gives you on-the-road access to your scanned docs, and in turn the NeatMobile app allows you to scan back to that pile of data from wherever you happen to be. This sync isn't a free service, however; monthly plans start at $5.99 for individual users. As such, the mobile app doesn't worry much about handling address book sync or other standalone features; the workflow is that you'll do that processing back on your Mac or PC with the downloaded scans. Neat's app does a solid job of scanning business cards in standalone mode, but for true accuracy with a human touch the optional NeatVerify pass submits your scan for a once-over by a person to make sure everything is in the right place. NeatVerify credits are linked to your NeatCloud account.
RE/MAX Regional Services using Passbook for business cards
We've already seen Apple's Passbook app used for sports tickets, gift cards and boarding passes, but leave it to the real estate industry to embrace one of its more interesting uses: business cards. RE/MAX is partnering with digital business card provider Vizibility to offer virtual, Passbook-compatible cards for all 4,500 of its real estate agents. The digital IDs include details like basic contact information and links to public profiles on sites such as LinkedIn. There's even a feature that allows you to see which contacts you share with whoever's card you are viewing. As the official press release notes, Vizibility's joint venture with RE/MAX marks the biggest consolidated push for Passbook-enabled business cards yet. But whether the functionality will become a major trend in the business world remains to be seen.
Moo.com working on NFC-equipped business cards, kicks off limited beta program today
Do you recall those fancy business cards that took a design cue straight out of your adored Facebook Timeline? Well, the company behind such neat idea is now working on bringing cards equipped with NFC technology, which will allow folks to add things like email address, URLs and even pinpoint locations for easy access via any maps application. Of course, most of this information can already be shared using typical business cards, but one of the biggest pros with the Near Field Communication method will be the ability to change this info at any given time without having to purchase a whole new set. Moo plans on having the NFC-ready cards available to the masses by 2013 -- that said, the startup's currently running a beta program where it will allow 150,000 lucky folks get a complimentary card with their order of a traditional sheet. There's a video demo down below for you to check out, and you should probably act fast if you're looking to get one for yourself ahead of the extensive rollout.
Daily iPad App: Business Card Reader HD lets you scan business cards on the go
SHAPE Services has an iPad version of its Business Card Reader app that'll make it easy for you to manage your business cards right on your tablet. The iPad version works in a similar way as its iPhone counterpart. It uses the camera on your iPad 3 to snap a photo of a business card and has a text recognition system that'll parse out the relevant contact details. Once you import the information, you can easily add the contact's details to your iPad address book. You can also sync the data to LinkedIn and other CRM systems using the instructions on SHAPE Service's website. The app works smoothly as long as you have a firm, steady grip on your iPad. Because the iPad is on the large side, though, it's hard to maintain a steady hand while photographing the business card. Any shakiness introduces blur, which diminishes the app's ability to recognize text. As a result, there can be several errors in the contact information that need to be corrected before you can save the entry. That being said, Business Card Reader HD can be useful when you want to enter a business card, and you only have your iPad. You just have to keep as still as possible to get the best results. The app is on sale right now, so you can purchase Business Card Reader HD for US$1.99, which is 70 percent off the app's regular $6.99 price tag.
Engineer makes light-up business cards with 555 timer, proves PCB skills
Sure, there have been some pretty creative variations on the standard paper business card, but if you're looking to make a career in electronics engineering, card stock isn't necessarily the best option for material. Such was the case for one student, who had the canny idea to make a card that demonstrates his printed circuit board know-how. He used a 555 timer that outputs a clock to the LEDs on the biz card, and placing a nine-volt battery on the terminals sets off the mini light show. See for yourself in the video below.
Daily iPhone App: WorldCard Mobile scans your business card collection
The paper business card may go away someday if innovative apps like Bump and Evernote Hello take over, but for now we're still dealing with these little chunks of cardboard. Of course, in almost all cases it's not the physical object we care about, but rather the data printed on the card. (Some exceptions are inevitable.) Getting those inky bits converted to actual bits is easy enough with your iPhone and the right app. My default tool for business card scanning has been CardMunch, which has a number of advantages: fast, ties in easily to parent company LinkedIn, accurate (using actual humans to do the card transcription) and free. Unfortunately, CardMunch's cloud dependency means that sometimes it can get backed up, and when you're sitting on an airplane with a stack of post-conference business cards to go through, it's quite likely useless. That's where the Penpower family of contact management apps comes into play. The flagship iPhone app is the US$6.99 WorldCard Mobile, and it picks up nicely where CardMunch leaves off. You can scan your cards neatly without any network connection, and all the OCR processing is handled locally on the phone. Additional features include the ability to copy an email signature and parse it into a contact record, which is a lot more useful than I thought it would be. How good is the OCR function? Well, you can test it yourself with the app's lite version (allowing three scans the first week, and one scan per week after that). In my evaluation, I'd give it a B+ compared to the intelligent transcription of CardMunch -- keeping in mind that CardMunch also makes mistakes on some cards. Given that it's working in disconnected mode, the slight loss in accuracy seems to be a reasonable tradeoff. What's a little harder to take is WorldCard Mobile's UI, which has the same weird aesthetic and hinky buttons as a lot of other utilitarian apps on the App Store. It compares unfavorably to CardMunch's clean look, and it's most reminiscent of the early versions of Readdle's apps (which have come a long way since v1, in fairness). The lite version will let you know pretty quickly whether the look will make you nuts or not. Penpower also has a WorldCard Contacts app, which lets you keep the card images alongside your contact records but omits the OCR tool; it's $2.99. There is an iPad version, too, which costs $14.99 and doesn't quite work as advertised with the iPad 2's onboard camera, per reviewers -- it's apparently not quite high-res enough for accurate recognition. If you're a frequent business card recipient and you'd like to be mobile-enabled, check out WorldCard Mobile; start with the lite version, and if it's useful you can fork over the $7 for the full build.
Moo.com makes business cards from your Facebook Timeline
It's a new year, which probably means that you're due for new business cards. And look, your card design from last year is precisely that -- so last year. Moo has announced a clever new design, which allows you to "take your Facebook Timeline offline, and hand it out to new friends, contacts and potential clients." Wildly enough, creating 'em is as easy as tweaking your Timeline. Once you're ready to roll, just sign in and allow Moo to access your data (cue privacy advocate yelling), check that you spelled your name right and hand over $15 for a stack of 50 cards. Update: Looks like there is a Like button after you've ordered. Nice!
CardMunch app adds LinkedIn profiles
Some of you may remember CardMunch before LinkedIn acquired it earlier this year. The app lets you scan business cards and add them to a contact list. It uses Amazon's Mechanical Turk service and an actual human to do the optical character recognition needed to translate the image into text. Now that LinkedIn has been working with the developers for the past few months, an updated version complete with LinkedIn profile integration has been released. Besides its tie-in to LinkedIn, the updated app has a fresh, new UI and improved support for the iPhone's camera. It also lets you add notes to each business card so you can remember where and when you met this new contact. Best of all, the app, which used to cost US$2.99 and 25 cents per scanned business card, is now available for free. [Via TechCrunch]
DIY business card displays your info via persistence of vision, fails to impress Patrick Bateman (video)
Still fancy the age-old business card and enjoy outrageous DIY projects that may or may not make you look foolish? Continue on then, dear reader. The peeps over at Instructables have provided a lengthy and seemingly difficult set of directions on how to craft a persistence of vision business card. POV allows your eyes to see text or images generated by light waving back and forth -- in other words, your name is displayed by swinging your arm in a giant circle. If you're cool with this, hit the source link, build your own and be sure to let us know how many contacts you make.
Seen@E3: The best business card ever
We got this business card LEGO person from LEGO Universe Creative Director Ryan Seabury yesterday, and every single person we have showed it to since agrees that it is indeed the best form of sharing contact information ever seen. Seabury's name and likeness are on the front, and his phone number and email are on the back of the little guy. We've placed him atop the pile of business cards that's been handed to us this week. We've met a lot of fun people on the show floor at E3, but if we need any LEGO-related advice, we'll know exactly who to call.
Video: augmented reality business card sells itself
Does your feeble mind recall those wicked awesome 3D Topps cards from earlier this year? How could you forget, right? It seems as if that very same technology has been shifted over to the wine and cheese crowd, and thanks to one James Alliban, now those all-too-boring business cards can also be equipped with augmented reality. Put simply, these cards have been imprinted with a 3D grid of colored planes on one side, and when placed in front of a PC webcam, a pixelated pop-up arrives to really make that first impression one that sticks. Hop on past the break to see exactly what we mean.[Via GadgetVenue]
Take Nintendo to work with you
If you have a need for a pile of business cards at the ready, then we have something special for you. Surely you want to personalize the ol' office, yeah? What better way to do that than by showing off your Nintendo love? Etsy seller lostmitten has this sweet little NES-themed business card holder that might be just what you need for that touch of flair.
