Maybe you've been in my shoes before. Imagine yourself standing on the hard floor of a trade show in Las Vegas in a stuffy suit and your feet are killing you. Despite the physical pain, you've made a lot of great contacts over the course of the week. Your pockets are bulging with business cards and one of your main tasks when you get back to the office will be to sort through them and get these people into your contact list. Quite the labor intensive process isn't it? What if there was an app that could take those business cards and put the people you met over the week into your address book on your phone? Well, we're in luck because such an app exists and it couldn't be any easier to use.WorldCard Mobile is an extremely robust app that has a lot of features but has also perfected that delicate balance between being an easy to use app, and one that offers a lot of detail. On first starting the app, I noticed the generous amount of wonderfully written help boxes that pop up and tell the user how to navigate the app. The concept is brilliantly simple. WorldCard Mobile makes use of your iPhone's camera and takes a picture of a business card. Once the picture is taken it scans the image and pulls out the words and interprets them into a contact file. The person's name ends up in the name field, the company name in the correct spot, and their phone numbers all listed where you would expect them. Once that's been done, you can export it to your Contacts app. If you sync your phone to your other computers and devices, you'll see immediately why this app is both powerful and an amazing time saver.
It doesn't stop at just scanning business card images. The app stores those images in its own little database and lets you browse through what you have previously scanned. There's also a feature that allows the user to take copied text from a person's email signature and exports it to a contact as well. By the way, exports to contacts can either create a new contact or merge the data with an existing contact.
Sarah and I both tried this app out for about a week and ran around looking for business cards to scan. We both figured out quite quickly that this app would solve the problem of bulging pockets stuffed with business cards as they could be scanned during a spare moment of time, added to the contacts file, and discarded. Sarah remarked that this would also save purse space. And, we're not the only ones who love WorldCard Mobile as it won 'Best Mobile App OCR' at the 2010 Mobi Awards.
This is the first paid app we have reviewed and its one of the best examples we've seen of an app that pays for itself quickly. The amount of time and frustration saved by this app is amazing. It's also built with a great attention to detail and delivers all the features any active business-person is looking for. We highly recommend you consider the WorldCard Mobile iPhone app if you have been looking for a faster, simpler and sleeker way to manage your business contacts. We think your next trade show or big meeting will be a lot more organized.
