A few weeks back we told you about a new app for BlackBerry that allowed you to simply take photos of business cards and then with the magic of real people that business card would be transcribed into a real contact and sent back to your BlackBerry smartphone to be placed into your contact list. While many of CrackBerry Nation thought this was a good idea, many also thought there were places that needed improvement. The team from Card2Contact listened and came back with version 3.0 of their application.
What’s new in 3.0
- Enhanced Contacts page.
- You can view the business cards that you have uploaded and find its processing status.
- Easy navigation (Touch or button click) for scrolling the business cards.
- In App Email feature to the users.
- Enhanced Home page design.
- Support page to provide your comments and request for a credit back.
Reader comments
Card2Contact gets updated to v3.0 - Brings along new pricing model
still: for a large amount of cards it is way to expensive and for only a few cards, i can find the time to type them myself.
also, i don't feel comfortable giving business information to others, privacy policy or not.
yup, exactly what I was thinking.
When I used this app, you would get 50 cards for 4.95, now its 15 and 9.99 for 35. This is supposed to be a more "price friendly" scheme? BTW, it was never very reliable to begin with and now pricing has increased dramatically, I think I'll pass on this one!
| Add that what it looks like to be caught in a mistake
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Hello! Here are some comments/answers regarding your questions!
@bandminc - Our Initial price was $9.99 for 30 Credits. Now we have introduced three packages with $4.99 for 15 credits, $9.99 for 35 credits and $19.99 for 75 credits. We have been getting feedback from our customers, and the new pricing models will help address the desire for more pricing options.Also, we have never offered 50 credits for $4.95. Having real people to convert and confirm information on the business cards is a huge advantage for our customers
@boldkeyboardholic, @raoul_duke - We don’t share any of your contact information with any other third parties. Security is our main concern, and we use the latest technology available to secure your information. All of our employees understand Card2Contact’s ethics around this and we do not take this policy lightly! We have a strict NDA policy in place that protects all our customers.
Happy Conversions!
Card2Contact Team
You're charging 19.99 for me to copy 75 business cards to my phone?? What kind of screwed up business model is this? I'll pass and just continue to type them in for free.
I'll charge 25 for $5!
But honestly, I'd just hang on to the card, get a decent pile and just take a few minutes to type it all in and exactly the way I want the information to appear....or keep the picture on my phone in a separate folder. Done....and done.
It's far more efficient to do it yourself and more financially responsible.
you must be one lazy person to not type it in yourself.
you can always type it in outlook and sync as well.. lets say you are that lazy, 35 cards is not worth 10 bucks. typing 35 entries would only take about 10 mins or less
speechless to see this on Crackberry.com.
CrackBerry is owned by a company that makes money either directly or indirectly trying to sale things. And that is just the way things work.
But this App is a prime example of what is wrong with the Apps that are available to BB users. Looked in both Android and Apple stores, there are a number of unlimited "scan" business card apps for only a few dollars each.
@chinh8310 - On an average,it takes about an hour to accurately convert 25 cards. Lets consider you have 100 cards, this would require atleast 4 hrs of your time and a lot of patience. We don't think 4 hrs of your time is worth $25.
Happy Conversions!
Card2Contact Team
@scalemaster34 - Yes, you have a few business card scanners in all the stores. But they are not using Real People to do the conversions. These apps are using OCR scanners to scan the image and provide the data, which is not accurate. Card2Contact uses human transcription workforce to convert your business cards into contacts.
Thanks
C2C Team
Good luck being able to read text from a business card taken by a Bold 9900 at that range...
I mean, I like the concept, but the camera on that phone is barely workable for this application.
One thing to consider is that Bold 9900/9930 are good phones but the camera quality is thoroughly poor. Especially on documents! From the deepest part of my heart I looked for an excuse to like this phone but photos of documents or part of documents are sadly bad on even size 10 fonts. Barcodes? Worse!
One has to try very hard to get a decent photo from any card reader (on 9900/30)as the hardware, camera, is very bad! Look at 10 attempts for a decent scan as an optimist.
Best to give users the truth. Its a good app but not on 9900/9930 - the models used on this article's photo. Needless to say i returned the Bold and got iphone 4s. Rather than 9900/30 imo RIM should have made autofocus and non auto focus. Makes more business sense. Some managerial positions need to have a decent camera for quick address book entry, email paragraphs details to solicitors, number plates, bar codes etc...yup etc as you never know when you'll need it but have to have it (hunch).
4 hours to convert 25 cards?? You have got to be kidding me!
I tested this today with the last 25 business cards I collected at houses I have for sale and it took me, not even kidding, 45 minutes to type in; full name, company name & address, 2-3 ph #s, email, and the property address I got their card at in the notes. Something is really wrong here and while it is nice you created a few jobs and pay people to database our contacts but the price you charge in order to pay these people is way off what this consumer will pay for something I can do on my own. Keep trying though.
STOP HATING ON THE DEVELOPER! THEY MADE A GREAT APP THAT USES HUMAN LABOR, WHICH IS ALLOT BETTER THAN CUMBERSOME BOTS. THE PEOPLE WHO ENTER THE INFORMATION CAREFULLY FOR YOU ARE GETTING PAID.
IF YOU DON'T LIKE THE APP, DON'T USE IT! IT'S THAT SIMPLE!!!
/end of rant.
It is not about the app itself, but it's concept.
You will pay for something that you can do it by yourself in less than a minute. Or give it to your kids to earn his/hers first $/€.
As far as the pricing and the question as to whether it's worth the money versus the time, it's a free market, so the dev has every right to price the app -- or, in this case, more accurately, the service -- however s/he wants. If it's worth the money to you, then buy/use it. If not, then don't. Is the dev way off when it comes to his/her estimate of how long it takes to enter a business card? Absolutely. (Even when entering the card info directly into your phone using a narrow, non-qwerty keyboard -- which of course nobody does, because people save cards until they get to a PC to enter them.) Was it stupid of him/her to make such a ridiculous and easily disproven claim in this forum? Absolutely. But none of that affects how you evaluate the value of this service. It does, however, affect one's impression of the trustworthiness of the company, which is the other issue here.
As to the question of contact information security, the dev says that info is safe; protected by company policy and employee NDAs. Is any of that true? I don't know. Does the dev permanently store a copy of every contact on their server? I don't know. Does the dev's website have a privacy policy that backs up the claims of security made here? I don't know. But afaik, there is no law that prevents a company or a web site from changing its policies, including publicly-announced security policies. And there is no guarantee that this company won't be bought by some other company that decides to sell all the contacts to Russian malware distributors. So all of that is moot, and once again, it's your choice whether you want to trust your contacts' business information to this company.
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