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The Fastest Way to Get a Phone Number - DYMO Card Scan App Review

Thursday, November 11th, 2010 – running time 03:36
Turn that stack of business cards you've collect into detailed and searchable contacts in your address book.

Segments

If you go to a lot of tradeshows, do a lot of business development, networking and working with various clients, then you surely end up with a fat wad of business cards. Many of those contacts can end up being pretty important, yet get lost in the jumble of that aforementioned "wad".

Thanks to the technology of optical character recognition (OCR), you can scan cards and turn the information on them into searchable text. The algorithms developed by DYMO help organize that scanned numbers and letters into appropriate fields for Name, Title, Company, Phone, Email, and so on.

Instead of needing a stand alone hardware card scanner attached to your computer, DYMO offers up iPhone and Blackberry apps that allow the user to scan "scan" cards in with the devices' built in camera.

Review by: David Prager

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dymo-cardscan/id380339043?mt=8&uo=4

DYMO CardScan

AppJudgment:
Download
Download
DYMO CardScan

Version 1.0 | Developed by Newell Rubbermaid, Inc | 0.4 MB | $9.99

PROS:
- You can throw collected business cards away
- Saves images of cards until you confirm the data is in the proper fields
- Auto justifies the images of your scans

CONS:
- Manual process of holding the phone's camera steady over each card to be scanned
- Only exports to your iPhone contacts
- It's still a science project for the OCR (optical character recognition) and the algorithm identifying where information is supposed to go to work properly. You'll have to custom inspect each scan to make sure the information has been logged and recorded properly.

00:38

Play

Pros, Cons & Final Judgment

DYMO CardScan does just as good a job as any stand alone hardware card scanner and noticeably speeds up the process of saving and logging information from business cards not as a hardware purchase, but as a $10 software (ie app) plugin for your iPhone/iPod Touch.

02:09

Play

Do you have another app you'd like us to review? Email us at appjudgment at revision3 dot com, ping us in the forums or on Twitter: @AppJudgment



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