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Business Card Reader: Scan Business Cards To Add Contacts To Your Address Book

by Bla1ze on 31 Dec 2009 04:02 AM
20
 
Business Card Reader: Scan Business Cards To Add Contacts To Your Address Book

SHAPE Services has released a new application for those of you who hate inputting information from business cards manually. Business Card Reader is a scanning utility that simply lets you scan a business card and by making use of ABBYY's text recognition technology allows for the extracted information to be added directly to your address book filling in all the appropriate fields. Having tested it on some business cards I have, I found it to be quite accurate in its rendering and identifying of information. Could be quite useful if you deal with business cards quite frequently.

Business Card Reader is available now for $9.95 but SHAPE Services does offer up a 7 day trial for everyone to check out before making a final purchasing choice. Supported devices include BlackBerry Tour, Curve 8900, Storm, Storm 2, Bold 9700 as they all have a higher resolution camera with auto focus to capture the data. Business Card Reader also supports different languages such as English, French, Italian, German and finally, Spanish.

Filed Under: BlackBerry Apps; Tags: contacts, SHAPE Services
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20 Comments

Posted by msgreenf Thursday, Dec 31, 2009 874 days ago

This looks very cool! I was talking about this yesterday at work looking for a similar functionality.

 
 
Posted by rarud Friday, Jan 01, 2010 873 days ago

Seems over priced to me, my previous non "smart" phones had this as a built in feature.

 
 
Posted by rohneas Thursday, Dec 31, 2009 874 days ago

I tried this, and the result was perfect with the business card I tested, but then it allowed me to exit without adding the card to my address book. Perhaps that is just because it is the free version?

Also, the sounds that it uses are quite annoying and seem to be at a volume level that is 10x higher than everything else on my phone. I didn't find a configuration option to turn them down, either.

The interface feels a bit unpolished on the storm, and the mock-trackball thing never works well on anything on the Storm (this included).

That being said, I think $10 is fair. If it was more polished and there was a Storm version (as opposed to the mock-trackball interface), I'd easily pay $20 or more for this.

 
 
Posted by MarkEdwards Thursday, Dec 31, 2009 874 days ago

I scanned about a dozen cards with my Storm, following their recommendation to do the pics in black and white and had only THREE of them even close to recognized. I've used the more expensive scanners, and I guess this is OK for a $10 app, but the results I had were far from what was boasted about in the post.

 
 
Posted by Dr.Boost Thursday, Dec 31, 2009 874 days ago

My old Dare or En V touch, maybe both did this stock. Def should of been stock on a BB. Business phone it gets out done by a dumb phone, dang! Come on RIM, push a little harder and you will perfect this gig.

 
 
Posted by renzi555 Thursday, Dec 31, 2009 874 days ago

Yeah, this has been on LG phones for a while. My VX9800 from 2005 did this (albeit really poorly).

 
 
Posted by tonyshep Thursday, Dec 31, 2009 874 days ago

Love the concept but it is beyond slow. It took me 20 minutes to scan three cards and every one needed conrrections typing in. Back to the drawuing board folks.

 
 
Posted by gradiego Thursday, Dec 31, 2009 874 days ago

I was really excited to use this app. It is not up to snuff. I don't know what this app is reading, but the output is gibberish. Well lit area, no flash, black & white...even in perfect conditions is misses just about everything on the card. Too bad. I should've used the free trial first and saved the $10.

 
 
Posted by crack-berry Thursday, Dec 31, 2009 874 days ago

Downloaded the business card reader... It sucks. I want my $10 back ! To many glitches, tried with 3 business with no luck " unable to scan error 3 times" WTF

 
 
Posted by johnnymac Thursday, Dec 31, 2009 874 days ago

Well maybe I wasn't patient enough, but I tested this app and it never worked from what I was able to tell.

Took the picture of the business card, and then when I went to 'find' the image from within the app, I could only select from about 10-15 images, of the 100s I have on my card. I tried to see if there was perhaps a folder I wasn't seeing (like - 'Shape' or 'BCReader' or something), but nothing was obvious to me.

I ended up deleting the app.

 
 
Posted by chaluk Thursday, Dec 31, 2009 874 days ago

CardSnap (available in App World) does the same thing, except it sends the data off to their servers for processing. I feel that it offers a more reliable OCR method and it costs half the price.

 
 
Posted by gthmcty1 Thursday, Dec 31, 2009 874 days ago

Cant get it to work with the BOLD 9700

 
 
Posted by blacktoothberry Thursday, Dec 31, 2009 874 days ago

big F'n waist of money

 
 
Posted by Furballz Friday, Jan 01, 2010 872 days ago

Totally unable to get it to recognize any cards, no matter how clear the photo.

 
 
Posted by djeddieone Saturday, Jan 02, 2010 872 days ago

shape services all in one AIM application is good but not this one. card snap is at app world for half the price and it works better then this business card reader plus you take the picture and then submit it over both wifi and 3g it takes about 10 seconds max to read the card 4.99$ and worth the price

 
 
Posted by jasonfyc Saturday, Jan 02, 2010 871 days ago

Definitely if this gets a bit of polishing! I was able to make it work with my own business cards, but some that are quite complex were leaving some desire to this app. My Storm was slow and hard to navigate but I eventually made it work. My Tour and 9700 were easier but their picture quality to be read needed to be enhanced a little. Clean it up... And I'm there!

 
 
Posted by jasonfyc Saturday, Jan 02, 2010 871 days ago

Definitely if this gets a bit of polishing! I was able to make it work with my own business cards, but some that are quite complex were leaving some desire to this app. My Storm was slow and hard to navigate but I eventually made it work. My Tour and 9700 were easier but their picture quality to be read needed to be enhanced a little. Clean it up... And I'm there!

 
 
Posted by Bikerman1972 Monday, Jan 04, 2010 870 days ago

Big waste of time.

 
 
Posted by bcsirish Thursday, Jan 07, 2010 867 days ago

As a person who handles 100's of business cards over a the course of a year, may be more than that, this is a great easy way to input the data into your phone and then sync with your computer. No more worrying about losing it, or even needing to carry a business card holder with you. Absolutely AWESOME App! I am frustrated that this very SAME app is only $5.99 for the I-phone and $9.99 for Blackberry, what is that all about?

 
 
Posted by kwstockhorse Saturday, Apr 10, 2010 774 days ago

downloaded this app for 9.95, used it with good success for 2 weeks, then bb went through an update and deleted license. Have been trying for several days now to find an accurate phone # or tech support sight to get this re-loaded without re-paying the 9.95 or even more to get the unlimited license. Absolutely not worth the price if you constantly re-load. Will try card snap next