Jan 11 2010
With the new year upon us, many business people are finding it important to get their contacts organized for the coming months. While online social sites such as LinkedIn make it easy for people to connect in the online world, the paper business card is still a standard at trade shows and in face to face meetings. The WorldCard Mobile iPhone application from Penpower Inc. allows for the two worlds to meet, digitally scanning business cards and depositing the information into the phones contact list.
It's not an uncommon site to open the desk drawer of a salesman, real estate agent or even CEO of a major corporation and find stacks and stacks of paper business cards from potential clients and vendors collecting dust and not providing any value to the recipient. In this digital world we live in - for a networked contact to be useful, it has to be digital. Traditionally, this has been done either through the manual labor of a lowly intern going through each business card and typing the information into a spreadsheet taking hours of time that could be better spent elsewhere, or through expensive business card scanning software and hardware packages. Now with WorldCard mobile, the iPhone 3Gs user needs only to download the app from iTunes to have full access to professional grade business card scanning.
Once installed, the WorldCard Mobile application uses the high resolution camera of the iPhone 3Gs to photograph business cards and pull the information off of them using parent company Penpower Inc's long proven OCR technology. With 18 years of experience in the field of image recognition, Penpower's technology provides superior recognition quality, allowing for text detection from many cards other readers cannot access at much faster speeds. "The iPhone is not known for being user friendly when entering a significant amount of text," said Dr. Tsay, CEO of Penpower Inc. "WorldCard Mobile makes it quick and easy to import a stack of business cards from after a conference or important meeting without the frustration of a touch screen keyboard." After cards have been scanned in, it is simply a matter of syncing the phone with the computer to load your contacts into your email program and social networks.
The iPhone is only the latest channel to be explored by the company, which also creates some of the top business card and document scanner hardware and software programs for personal computers. The WorldCard Mobile system has been available for Windows Mobile and Symbian since 2007, and has over a million users worldwide.
WorldCard Mobile is available in the business category of the iTunes App Store for 6.00 pounds Sterling, but is currently on sale for 3.49 pounds. WorldCard Mobile is designed specifically for the iPhone 3GS, utilizing its higher quality camera for greater scanning and recognition capabilities. Chinese, Japanese and Korean versions are also available for purchase.
Source: http://www.penpower.net/