ScanBizCards Streamlines Contacts

ScanBizCards attempts to give you a handy way to take business card information and instantly add it to the iPhone's address book.

By and large it works as advertised, though the conversion to text is not fully seamless and will require some editing in most cases. Getting started with ScanBizCards is fairly straightforward — either import an existing photo of a business card or take a picture when ScanBizCards is open. The app will then scan the text, looking for information like phone numbers, email addresses, web site URLs and a company name.

The better you can hold still and get a focused image, the better your results will be. Taking the picture in direct sunlight also increases the chances ScanBizCards will find all the information. It seemed to have more trouble if there was a lot of bold text

Once the scanning is finished, the information is then available for you to edit and import into the iPhone's contacts app. The new contact's e-mail address can be used to invite to connect on business networking site LinkedIn. After a card has been scanned you can try and make contact directly within ScanBizCards —  you can call, text, e-mail or visit the web site of that particular individual. This is a bit of a duplication of what you would already have after inputting this information into the contacts, but it could come in handy.

The infamous cover flow finds a way to make an appearance in ScanBizCards as a way to scroll through the business cards. The smaller images make it unlikely that this would be an efficient way for anyone to find contact information, but it makes for some nice eye candy.

There is also an option to export a contact to Excel. The selected contacts will then be attached to an e-mail in .csv (Excel-compatible database) format.

Like many other snap-a-photo and OCR it apps, your success with ScanBizCards will depend on the image you start with. Original iPhone owners are best advised to steer clear unless you're using Griffin Technology's Clarifi case which boosts the camera's macro abilities. For everyone else, YMMV, but if you've got a stack of 250 business cards left over from Macworld, then ScanBizCards could be just the thing to help you get organized.