REVIEW
David Shapshak
Cardscan 600c
Amazingly, in the ever-increasingly wired world, not many people send digital business cards. A simple attachment on an e-mail provided you are both using Microsoft’s ubiquitous Outlook all-in-one e-mail and contacts program sends your business card to the e-mail recipient, who can then save it quite easily in their contacts directory.
Doing this in person is still technologically difficult although users of Palm handhelds have been “beaming” each other electronic business cards for years and hence we still have that rectangular paper business card.
If you collect a card at every meeting, at the end of the week you will have a handful and by the end of the month a bundle. Traditional means of handling these include the alphabetical Rolodex or sorting them into a folder. However, if you need details off any of them you have to sort through them to find it, or laboriously type the details into your computer whenever you get new cards.
But there is a way of digitising them. The CardScan 600c, made by Corex, is a small scanner that “reads” the cards and digitises them.
What is very impressive is how it intelligently works out names, titles, phone numbers and e-mail addresses and stores them in its directory. You can then transfer, or port, the contacts across to Outlook or other personal information managers, as this form of software manager is known, such as Lotus Notes or Goldmine.
Scanning the cards is quite simple and takes less than a minute, using Optical Character Recognition, which converts printed text to digital text, with a very high success rate. I tried a variety of cards horizontal and vertical, and some with ridiculously small text and was satisfied it provided the 95% accuracy it promised. The reader can scan both sides of the card and have no buttons to press or fiddle with. You just pop the card in and CardScan does the rest.
Once in the CardScan directory the onscreen index looks remarkably like a Rolodex it captures the obvious fields of name, title, company, address, phone, fax, mobile, e-mail and Web address. You can then verify the details and save them, and all your “cards” are easily searchable. It even saves an image of the card, should you want to keep a visual record or corporate logo. It also has the option of attaching a scanned version of your own card as an e-mail signature, although I’d recommend a digital card if you’re going to do that.
Like many contacts organisers, CardScan has a companion, password-protected website, to which you can upload all your contacts and access from any computer should you forget your contacts book at home. You can also choose from numerous formats to print out a hard copy of the index.
Obviously designed for business use, it can be shared across a network, as can the contacts you scan.
What is also very impressive is how it works with hand-held computers for travelling business executives, both PocketPC and Palm. However, the CardScan has a cumbersome mains power supply, so you will need adaptors. It could very easily be powered, like so many other peripherals, through the USB cable that connects it to your computer.
I tested the 600c, which has colour-scanning capabilities and retails for R2995, while the black-and-white scanning 500 model goes for R1995 (both excluding VAT). It is distributed by Digital Integrated Technologies: Tel: (011) 454 0573.