My old Touch Pro had a program on it called WorldCard that would scan a business card using the camera, then parse out all the info on it & build you an Outlook contact. According to Worldcard's website they have an iphone version, windows mobile, and symbian...but no android. I don't know how hard it'd be to develop something like that, but I figured I'd throw it out there...its just about the only thing I really miss about my old phone.
try Google Goggles, just came out, its pretty bad ass.
I tried it. It's much worse than most any card scanners I've tried.
Business cards are complex with all sorts of fonts and non-standard location. It takes some smarts for a scanner to figure things out. I gave up on a top desktop card scanner because it was only ~85% right. I could enter the whole card information in the time it took to look carefully at each field and correct things.
Google Goggles is very bad at business card scanning. OK, it's worse than a toy right now. Even on the simplist of business cards, it can only get 30-50% of the information with a perfect picture. It sometimes gets a majority of the characters (never 100%) in the scan and conversion, but even then spews them randomly all over the contact form. It has yet been able to pick up the street address of someone and put it in the right place, in dozens of trys on very simple business cards.
Hmm..thats weird. Idk ive tried it like twice on business cards and got 100% both times.
Considering your success, I tried a lot harder. I did the following:
Waited for the 2.0.1 update with better camera focussing.
Cleaned the camera lens
Used a very bright light
Tried with a simple black on white business card
Held the camera button down part way until focus.
Held the camera still for another second after the click
Zoomed until the card fit in the upper 2/3 of the screen, where it seems to want to crop.
After all that, I managed to collect about 75% of the card information on the very simple card. For example, I was able to get all three phone numbers correctly, and the email to show up as email on the intermediate screen.
But then I hit Add to Contacts, and of the three phone numbers found, only one was listed in the contact list, defaulted to home. I couldn't find any way to add the other two phone numbers it clearly found.
So far, Google Business Card feature is just a big time waste. I can enter the info by hand way far faster than this software can scan and mangle the information. They need someone at Google to actually make this software work.
Last edited by LarryQW; December 11th, 2009 at 10:49 PM.
I too would like to be able to scan business cards and found Goggles just as lacking in all the same ways. is development continuing on goggles I wonder? Noting about it seems to work as advertised.
Capture A Card is the way to go... take a picture of the card, send it to the elves that are patiently waiting for you, they send back the data, you import it to your contacts. I have even sent pictures of cards with cell numbers HAND WRITTEN on the card, and they get it correct as long as the hand writing is legible. Awesome service!!!
Maybe people will start to put 2D barcodes on their business cards so other people can enter info into the cards more easily. That would be something. XD
I've been trying to use Google Goggles as a business card scanner, but it doesn't seem to work. I take the picture, and it searches the intenet for instances of the logo in the card instead.
Maybe people will start to put 2D barcodes on their business cards so other people can enter info into the cards more easily. That would be something. XD
I just added a QR code to my business card. Slickest way to go! Now we have to get everyone to do it.
I know this is an old thread.. but it was news to me.
I did not know Google Goggles can do business cards.
I tried it.. and it sucked!! so many mistakes in simple fonts and info.
then i say that the app has a LED Flash button. I turned on the LED flash (EVO 4G). also, i noticed that it does not like to be too close. Trying to fill the screen with the card image was not as accurate. I backed it up and had it about 2/3 of the screen with the card, so that the LED light was more on the card.
Hi guys, we are happy to announce here that we have released ScanCard FREE VERSION (instead of previous lite version) on Android Market.
You would be able to capture images, recognize and save limitless cards. The service is also cloud-based, which means your cards are backed up on the cloud service as well. Then you will be free to manage your contacts anywhere at anytime. The only constraint is that you need a web synchronization account, which is free charge as well, to use the solution.
By far, we are the only “100% free” business card reader working on Android OS, which recognizes Chinese, English and other European languages, with a real performant OCR (Optical Character Recognition) engine, accuracy up to 95%+++. Compared to most cloud-based solutions, with ScanCard you are getting the recognized contact information immediately after capturing the business card's image, no need to wait days and hours before getting it on hand.
Of course,putting 2D barcodes on our business cards, seems great IDEA to us. but it is far from widely used though.
Ever tried a couple of text scanners, like worldcard, camcard. Seems working well. The pity is they ask to pay 5,6 bucks, or more. Thrilled to learn this new one. I am gonna give a try.
Business Card Scanner
is development continuing on goggles I wonder? Noting about it seems to work as advertised.
Thrilled to learn this new one. I am gonna give a try.
