Why would we need a card scanner? As professionals, we all know that each time we meet someone new, we exchange business cards. But sometimes we collect more than ten business cards a day.
We can buy “Kenko” card boxes and try to organize these cards according to the alphabet. However, as the card boxes on the shelves behind my computer monitor will readily testify, it is a losing battle.
Like most of you, I have collected thousands of business cards over the years. Not all of them are current and the majority are more than ten years old. People have moved jobs many times within that period of time. Their contact data may have changed over and over again. They may have a new email address or new mobile number.
That is why I end up having stacks of the most current name cards tied with rubber bands and placed on top of my keyboard. Every time I need to find someone’s phone number, I have to ask my wife to go through the piles of these business cards and she hates it, and I do not blame her.
I bet you have read about card scanning gadgets, but do you know what else card scanners can do other than storing images of cards on our computers?
It turns out that a good card scanner can do much more than that. I learned about what it is designed to do when, courtesy of SPS, I was able to play around with the CardScan Executive from DYMO.
The hardware looks like an ordinary mobile scanner cut into two. When a card is inserted, the scanning process will start automatically. The scanner works quite fast, and it can still do its job well even when the card is inserted slightly askew.
It is the software that really shines. The CardScan Contact Management comes with a full database application with the same name. It creates a new record for every new business card scanned. It also reads the characters using a built-in optical character recognition tool that is intelligent enough to put the right data in the right fields. So, for example, the first name is entered into the First Name field, the last name into the Last Name field, the position in the Job Title field, etc.
What if we need to find someone whose name eludes our memory and the only information we have is that he was once involved in a team. Here is where the Notes text field will come in handy. Suppose we have typed in the name of the team after scanning his business card, we can retrieve the data of all the team members including his, by searching for the team name.
During my tests, I saw the OCR was capable of recognizing characters printed in many different fonts. If a card image is too dirty for the OCR, it can be zoomed in on and cleaned using the provided tools. The newer CardScan products can scan in color, too.
The biggest challenge in card scanning and data capturing is that there is no standard at all for the design. Cards may be cut in different shapes and in different sizes, although the standard ISO standard is A8 (7.4 x 5.2 centimeters).
Worse, card designers place the information anywhere they like — on top or at the bottom, on the left or right side, or all over.
If the OCR enters the captured data in the wrong field, it can be manually corrected. Because it is a full-fledged database, we can search and retrieve, reorganize and manage the contact data as well as eliminate duplicates.
This is, as I see it, the key benefit of a good card scanner.
Otherwise, we can simply use a flatbed scanner to scan the cards or even a smartphone such as the E71 and E72 from Nokia.
Several smartphones, such as the Omnia from Samsung, can capture the data on a business card and add it to the contact list. However, we have to first capture the image of the business card with the cell phone’s camera. To get a useable capture, we also have to ensure that the cards will appear within a frame in the viewfinder before touching the shutter button. With practice, it may take a little time to scan one business card, but if we have 20 cards to convert into contact data then it will be an unwieldy task at the end of a tiring day.
Once the business cards have been scanned and read, the CardScan database can be synchronized with any contact management software that we may be using. And, of course, it can be synchronized with any smartphone such as a BlackBerry, iPhone and Nokia E90. The synchronization can also be performed from the smartphone to the CardScan database.
There is a wide range of makes and models of card scanners from companies such as Penpower, IRIS, Xerox, Plustek and Visioneers.
A CardScan user can backup all his contact data on the Internet free of charge. So, if you happen to be so unlucky to lose your notebook and smartphone — like I once was, you will still have a backup copy.
What are the downsides? I can only find two. First, the CardScan still cannot read East Asian fonts such as Hiragana and Katakana. On the other hand, it reads European characters including Russian and Hebrew. So, for now, if you need to scan business cards that use Chinese characters, you will have to look somewhere else.
Secondly, it is not easily affordable for small businesses. CardScan Executive, for example, will set them back about Rp 2.9 million (US$319). However, it is a card scanner that will help you turn contact data into a company asset. Imagine if your employee resigns, he may take away all the cards as he leaves but you will still have the data. In today’s business world, our network of contacts is simply invaluable.
www.cardscan.com
