Reading business cards on Windows Mobile

It's quite interesting how Microsoft made more and more inroads into my personal life. The last barrier (or is it?) just fell last week, when I switched my mobile from a Sony Ericsson P910i to an HTC TyTN. And with that, my year-long Symbian OS liason, which started in the days of the early Palms, has come to an end, and now I suddenly am a Windows Mobile user. Well, an unbeatable Tytanic Vodafone deal (read: high phone bill) made that move relatively easy.

The daily use of the new device needs a little getting used to, even though it's plain ol´ Windows (well, sort of), with Start button, Office apps, media player and all the rest. Now, of course, I need to check out all those funky apps that would make the new toy even more attractive. My friend Gary pointed me to the Gmail midlet, which I would have started using immediately, if it wouldn't have required a new JVM. So now I'm back in the plumbing looking at IBM's J9 to make it work.

Another really useful type of application I found is PenPower's Business Card Recognition tool. This is particularly useful for people that collect (that is, exchange) large numbers of business cards. Just last week alone at our Symposium event in Cannes, I must have gotten about 60 from clients, vendors, and prospects. Entering all those details into the address book is typically a time killer work during long flights. I checked out Penpower's trial version, by which you simply take a photo shot of the card, and the OCR engine generates text, which then gets copied into Outlook. Worked a few times pretty well, but then stopped, although unregistered versions are supposed to work for 30 days. Looks like Taiwanese days are much shorter then European days. Oh well.

Alternatively, I dabbled with scanR, which is an online service of the same kind. You take the photo, send it to an email address, and voila, they return a vCard file, that you simply import into Outlook. Worked alright, but I don't feel that comfortable sending complete details of people I know to a third party, although they claim to follow privacy rules.

>> scanR uses the information we collect to set up and provide the scanR service to you. scanR also stores some or all of the information we gather from processing images through the scanR service in a database for the purposes of improving the accuracy and performance of the service. Unless approved by you in advance, scanR will not provide third parties with access to any information captured from processed images. We may review personal information for the purposes of resolving a problem or support issue. <<

They store all cards to "improve the accuracy"? That's nonsense, they could just as well use hand-scribbles to do the same. Also, there is no information as to how long that data will be stored. What really was interesting is this verbage: Unless approved by you in advance, scanR will not provide third parties with access to any information captured from processed images. I would really appreciate that, however, there is no place on the whole website to opt-in or opt-out, so this "approval" doesn't really exist. Looks like I can only send business cards of general managers of some hotel or the card of my gas station attendant to this service. Then again, why would I want to store those addresses in the first place?