If you’re someone who networks often and goes to a lot of conferences or meetings, there’s a good chance you have a large number of business cards. Of course, you would want an easier and more sufficient way to organize and save them besides stuffing them away in your wallet or around your desk.
There are some basic business card readers that will do the trick by scanning the business card and saving basic contact info. Most of these card scanners do the job, but if you want something more detailed with a few more bells and whistles, the team behind DocScanner has just the answer for you.
Overview
SciFiScanner by Haave Oy ($1.99, App Store Link) does much more than generally scanning by fetching more than contact info off the card and searching social networks for additional profile information. Information not on the business card is automatically added to the profile if it finds the user on any social network such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
When you first launch SciFiScanner, the app asks you to sign into your Google account to connect to Google Contacts. Once you start adding business cards to the app, all the contacts within the app automatically get sent to Google Contacts. SciFiScanner also connects to your Google Contacts account to import the contacts you saved from the app. Scanning business cards can either be a hit or miss depending on how readable the card is.
Once you scan the card and it grabs the info, it searches all the major social networks and if there are a few different people with the same name, it just selects the most popular one and adds the rest of their info to the profile. This can end up being a problem, so in this case you would manually have to edit that info. One reason it seems SciFiScanner asks to connect to Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn is that it would be easier to get that person’s info once you scan their business card if you’re already connected with them on that certain social network.
Instead of trying to fetch info from a wide range of people with the same name, it eliminates that step, so in the end, it will add profiles faster than what it normally does. Of course, the downside of this is if you just received an individual or company’s business card, there’s a good probability you aren’t friends with them to begin with. In the end, you might just wind up with basic information, which was already on the card.
One of the key aspects, which Haave Oy had focused on, is the organization of all profiles. There are a number of different ways to edit and sort through contacts, and especially if you have a lot, it comes in handy quite often. You can add, edit, or delete details from any contact. You can also drag and drop information throughout the contact to your preference.
Besides just taking a photo of a business card, you also have the option to either choose a photo from your camera roll or from an HP enabled scanner. Of course, just scanning it right from the app would probably get the best results because the camera can read the card faster since the card will be within the guidelines.
Overall
One thing I had difficulty with was trying to get a wide variety of cards to scan. The easiest ones to scan are business cards that have simple text and no background. I tried to scan a few different cards that had some kind of photo or logo. Unfortunately, it didn’t even end up fetching any information. It would just say “scanning document” for a while and eventually it wouldn’t find any results.
Once in a while the app would even crash and I ended up having to scan again with the same result, so the only way to enter some contacts in is manually or just choosing from your camera roll. Nonetheless, SciFiScanner is still a great managing app with some helpful features to easily organize your business cards. It also takes it one step further by adding a social aspect, which previously hasn’t been used in card readers.
Price: $1.99, App Store Link
Rating: 4/5[rating:4]
Pros:
- Great interface and different sorting options of contacts
- Connects to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to find additional profile info
- All info and contacts are saved into in-app file manager as well as Google Contacts
Cons:
- Not all business cards scanned fetch info
- App sometimes crashes when searching for contact info even after quitting and relaunching
