You might be familiar with Shoeboxed, a service that lets you mail in your receipts and business cards for them to scan and organize for you. I recently reviewed the service. As with my usual luck, just after my review the company released a new iPhone app that is pretty cool: the Shoeboxed Business Card Reader and Business Card Scanner.
Instead of sending in your business cards, you can use the app to take a picture of them with your iPhone’s camera.
Of course, this does require a Shoeboxed account, but they do have a free plan. You don’t need a paid Shoeboxed account to use it.
Once you submit your business card image, you can see the status of the processing.
It does take a while for the processing to be done (about 20 minutes for me), but the reason for that is because the image is OCR’ed and then an actual real person (remember those?) verifies the data.
When the processing is done, you can view the information and add the contact to your iPhone’s contact list (you can choose to do this automatically if you want) and of course view the business card’s image. You can also save the image with the iPhone’s contact too.
One thing that would be nice is if you could export/email a PDF of the image straight from the app, but I guess you can’t have everything. If you do want to export it, you can log in to your Shoeboxed account via the website and do it there.
All in all, if you are someone who deals with business cards regularly, I could see this saving you quite a bit of time and the price is certainly right.
If you have any other great workflows for dealing with business cards on your mobile device, I’d love to hear about them in the comments.
(Thanks to DocumentSnap reader Jamie for pointing to it in this business card post).