How to Keep Track of Business Cards and Contacts: CardScan
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You probably have a business card, even if you aren’t part of a business. You probably have something that you hand to people so they know how to contact you. At Macworld, I ran into the people who make CardScan, so I thought I’d give it a try.
this solution features a desktop scanner and full-featured software that scans in color in about three seconds. More than a business card scanner, CardScan’s powerful, easy-to-use software is a complete contact management solution. CardScan keeps your contact data safe, securely backing up your data to our CardScan at Your service online service at no charge.
I’ve had a CardScan Scanner for awhile, and used it on Windows. When I used it years ago, I ran into a few headaches. The software was difficult to use, so I just stopped trying to use it. So at Macworld when I saw them demonstrating this for the Mac, I had to check it out. I told them about my old Windows experiences. Since they recognized me, they sent a review unit home with me to play with and review. How great is that?!
I installed it and connected the CardScan. For the most part, the software is much easier to use for the Mac, and a cleaner experience. You set the business card in the try and the machine will automatically pick up there’s a card there and scan it in. Once it’s in the software, you can crop it or rotate it if need me.
Even though the font is small, you can see that it picked up all of the information on the card! That’s excellent. It will hyperlink the address and take you to a Google Map if you click it. The email will link you to whatever your default email client is. Also, it will link off to the web address if there is one printed on the card.
The software for Mac OS X has Cover Flow! I love that! I can browse through the business cards much as I would browse through my music, looking at the cover art in iTunes. I’m a visual learner, so this particular feature is very welcomed.
It’s done a good job of taking information on the business cards, and putting it into the software. It didn’t do so well with business cards that have a darker background, but I’m sure that will get tweaked over time. Nothing is perfect… not even me.
My review on the CardScan is very, very positive, and I will be scanning the rest of the huge stack of business cards I have into the software. I will no longer have to dig through the stack in the drawer – I can just browse through them on my Mac.
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3 Comments
Jojospaghettio
January 19th, 2009
at 6:36pm
This seems great to me.
Two things about it though that may keep me from buying it:
1. How good is the software for Windows
2. Will it create a vcard/import the data that it collects into something like Address Book, Thunderbird, or Outlook?
trids
January 20th, 2009
at 2:26am
You should try Evernote instead of CardScan .. it even OCRs handwriting, and rotated text too!
I “scan” any new business cards (and also wine labels, etc) with my cellphone camera, and upload it immediately to my EverNote scrapbook. There it gets automatically OCR-ed and indexed, and is available for searching in seconds .. from my phone AND from my desktop!
LOL — this is not an advertisement! But it is just a small bit of what EverNote does. For Free ;o)
Seriously check it out – you’ll be glad you did.
Laurie
October 11th, 2009
at 8:39am
I have used CardScan for years with Windows and it’s a great tool. In order to use CardScan with Vista 64-bit, you need to either buy version 8 or get them to upgrade you from version 7 for free (shame them into it!). It’s really easy to import CardScan contacts into Outlook as Outlook contact records.
I have also recently started using Evernote and was hoping that Evernote can convert a business card image into a contact record that can be uploaded to Outlook (.vcf format). But I can’t find any references to that and it doesn’t seem to be a feature of the software. This might make me dump Evernote — not sure yet.
Does anyone know how to use Evernote to create Outlook contact records? I don’t want to have to separately search for people in both Outlook and Evernote.
Thanks.