If you"ve ever been stuck in a situation where your business contact doesn"t have a spare business card on them, or you want to quickly add a new contact into your phone, than you might just be looking for WorldCard Mobile.
The iPhone application works with just about any type of business card, taking a picture of the card first, then scanning it for keywords and phone numbers, entering them into your contacts. The application can detect a variety of words, including phone number, email, location, business name and just about anything else on a business card you"ll find.
My experience with the software, scanning our very own Neowin business cards, I noticed that after each time I took a snap shot with my iPhone 4, it would sometimes mistakes things on the card and include unwanted words or numbers, even missing numbers or letters at time. Luckily, the program allows you to review, edit, add or even retake the picture before adding the contact into your contacts.
However, that was just the experience with our Neowin business cards, which can be tricky for a simple camera to pick up on, even with the LED flash on. I also found the orientation of the card and/or phone is required to capture the text as clear as possible.
When capturing a standard white and black business card, it was a breeze and detected the characters perfectly. However, this varies on the type of font used on the business card.
WorldCard Mobile supports a number of languages, including Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. Sadly, the application doesn"t support any character-based languages like Japanese, who are huge on business cards, where the proper introduction is to exchange business cards in Japan.
WorldCard Mobile is available on iTunes for $5.99 and supports iOS 4.0 and above.