Business card readers are a useful invention. When a lot of business cards have accumulated again after a trade fair or a longer business visit, you used to have to do a lot of work by yourself. Typing business cards costs time and nerves and blocks time for the essential things of work. In this blog article, different solutions for and types of business card readers will be presented that can help you save time and money.
Stationary devices as business card readers
The first variant of business card readers consists of stationary devices in which the business cards are digitized by a scan. Then the software installed on the device is used for OCR recognition, i.e. conversion of the image into text. The text extracted this way is then examined for contact data and formatted by the scanner's software. While the use of such business card readers seems to make sense at first glance, the disadvantage is the long processing time. The business cards have to be collected, stored and transported back to the office. In addition, such a business card reader is impractical and therefore too unwieldy for use at trade fairs. A business card reader also lags behind when it comes to recognition, because updates to the stationary software are usually difficult to carry out and are not possible on the fly.
Examples for stationary devices are among others:
- IRISCard Anywhere 5
- Worldcard Color Scanner
Reading business cards with mobile apps on the smartphone
The other variant of the business card reader lies in mobile apps. A simple photo is taken with the smartphone and the data extracted from it is also processed into a contact data record using an algorithm. The advantages of the mobile solutions are above all two things. Firstly, the mobile solution is much more flexible in daily use. For example, an important business card that you don't want to lose or store for a later extraction can be scanned directly after a conversation. In addition, the possibility of a fast update cycle provides significantly better recognition over time. The software can be updated again and again on the fly.
Conclusion: The advantages of mobile business card readers outweigh the disadvantages
From our point of view the decision for one of the two systems is simple. With the snapADDY business card scanner, we deliberately chose a mobile solution during development. From our point of view, the main advantage is the continuous improvement of data recognition, which we can guarantee in this way. This enables us to continuously improve our parser we were able to significantly improve the data quality last year by using deep learning techniques. By focusing on the continuous improvement of data quality, we can differentiate ourselves from the competition.
The advantage of the mobile solution also lies in the lack of media breaks. This refers to switching between different media. In the past, contact data was recorded in a physical contact book or saved in Excel. Nowadays, however, the data must usually not only be stored in the phone book of the mobile phone, but also often be stored directly in the CRM system as a central means of communication in the company. With a mobile solution like the snapADDY business card scanner we have implemented exactly this direct connection with your CRM system!
With snapADDY you can scan business cards in the following products: