iPhone Contact Capture, WorldCard Gets The Job Done

by Bill French on 13/07/10 at 5:00 am

Bill French is an information architect specializing in Internet applications. He is also the co-founder of MyST Technology Partners and Senior Editor for iPhoneCTO.

Let me just state that I hate typing in contacts or dealing with capturing contact information. I only publish stories about iPhone apps that are compelling or change my attitude in some way. So here I am, eating my own words concerning contact capturing tools.

If the contact information doesn’t magically find it’s way into my contact list through direct capture in Outlook, or ,via Plaxo, I probably won’t have it in my array of contact databases which span iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Windows. And to make matters more complex, all of these inbound contact funnels emerge in Gist, a contact-based social connections dashboard.

As a geek, contacts are just an aspect of business that I’ve never really taken seriously or managed to focus on to create a streamlined management approach. I’ve tried so many methods and ideas. A few years ago I thought I had the process nailed – photograph every business card, drop them into Evernote (which is graphically searchable) end of story. But there are so many aspects of this approach that didn’t work. I know, it was a dumb idea; feel free to roll your eyes anytime.

In retrospect, I had the right model and iPhone provided the game-changer that I was groping for. I simply lacked the software and possibly many iterative upgrades that led us to iOS4 which improves the ability to design text and image recognition necessary to create a high-performing and productive solution.

WorldCard sent me a free review code (I think I’m obligated to mention this under the new federal blogger laws), and to be honest, I’ve always been skeptical about contact capturing technologies, so I never would have bought this anyway. But I’m an overnight convert – this tool changed my outlook (pun intended) for three key reasons:

It works every time. Even in low light, slightly blurry, or not quite aligned, a photo of a biz card is recognized flawlessly and ready to export to your contacts database.
Images or text. WorldCard can process a block of copied signature information as easily as it can dissect a business card photo. I’ve also tested it on random chunks of contact data and it performed well.
Context. Almost with certain predictability, the opportunity to capture new contact information occurs when you’re in a mobile context and when there is unlikely access to a keyboard.

WorldCard also works with iPad even though there’s no camera. The text copy-capture works great with email-embedded signature blocks. I also tested it with Camera for iPad which makes it possible to capture photos directly to iPad. The possibility for blurry pictures is increased with this approach but a steady hand made it possible to snap business card pics remotely and read them right into WorldCard.

I also used business card images captured with non-iPhone cameras that I stored in cloud services such as DropBox and Evernote. As long as the image is crisp and well-lit, WorldCard will read and interpret the data pretty accurately. Access to your business card images in these cloud services from iPad or iPhone is pervasively supported of course.

Issues

Predictably, there are some circumstances where WorldCard didn’t perform well.

• Cards with low textual contrast, especially cards with dark colors.

• Cards will really funky layouts and deep color tones.

• Low light environments.

Overall, I’ve enjoyed my early experiences with this app. This is also one of those apps where an iPad-specific version is unnecessary; the iPhone version runs fine on iPad and it also takes advantage of specific iOS features to create higher interpretation accuracy. However, I really couldn’t see any difference between the performance on iPhone [running iOS 4] and iPad running iOS 3.2.

Dreaming

It would be really nice if I could send captured contact information to my CRM system, or a spreadsheet in Google Docs, or even better – direct to a Mail Chimp email list. Just saying…