App Review: BC Reader

You're walking the show floor, mingling, making contacts and exchanging details. Now you could be one of those who grabs every business card in sight only to end up losing them when you get back to the office and dump the conference bag. Or you could walk around being the smug guy with an iPhone, scanning everybody's business cards using this app.

To be fair, it's still going to be safer to just grab the cards anyway but in a push - and there's no denying this hasn't happened - you could take a snap of somebody's business card when they have no more to give out.

BC Reader, as it appears on the iPhone and iPod menu, is actually short for Business Card Reader. The guys over at Shape Services have one of the few mobile solutions in this category, so there's no mistaking it when you search the iTunes App Store.

Fire it up and it instantly loads the main menu where you're given the option to scan a new card, scan an existing photo or access the business card holder - a sort of touch-screen rolodex for all the contacts you've scanned before.

Select the first option and it starts up the iPhone camera (or iPod touch camera, if you're using the latest-gen touch). To help remind you that the phone needs to be held in landscape mode, the right-hand edge has arrows pointing up and text saying 'This side up'.

From here it's also possible to change the text scanning mode from Western language characters to East Asian characters.

A simple tap of the screen takes a photo, after which three to nine seconds are spent analysing the text on the card.

Obviously, without any accuracy this would be useless and without the fuzzy logic of a human brain it would be even worse at doing its job. Business cards with weird logo designs and lots of colours are probably easily deciphered by your eyes and brain but a computer with binary logic can only have so much visual compensation coded in.

Thankfully, the logic and optical character recognition in BC Reader works really well. During testing it was quickly obvious that direct lighting makes a huge difference (since this adds contrast, you see).

With shadows or glare the words would often be garbled mumbo-jumbo, but close-to-perfect lighting gave great results. It's not hard to get, either.

Once a card has been analysed for text the software will create a new contact in the address book on the iPhone. Fields for name, surname, e-mail and phone numbers are almost always perfect, while business names - often logos - would be replaced with other printed information, usually the slogan or division of the company.

It's all editable before saving, too, so if anything is misspelled (or misrecognised?) it can be sorted.

It's as straightforward as can be and can be a really useful business tool, especially for travelling salesmen types. One feature we would like is a custom photo option.

At the moment BC Reader uses a picture of the business card as that person's photo in the address book. Perhaps it could pop up, after saving the contact details, with a request to take a photo of the person who handed it out. Pretty please, Shape Services?