Scanners make saving business cards easier

USA TODAY, November, 2006 by Edward C. Baig

You leave a conference or sales call with a pocketful of business cards. You swear you'll make time to enter contact names and addresses into a computer. Only it never happens. You've got piles of cards that date back to the Clinton years. I've been testing two products that promise to help the organizationally challenged.

Silicon Valley start-up ScanR offers a service that can turn camera-phones into business-card scanners. I'm comparing it with the new version of hardware and software from CardScan, a Cambridge, Mass., company that has been around for years. CardScan is pricier but faster and more reliable. The CardScan Executive Version 8 scanner costs $260. ScanR is free, though the company may eventually charge about $5 a month for a set number of scans. Either way, you're responsible for carrier charges incurred by e-mailing scanned images. Neither ScanR nor CardScan are accurate enough to eliminate manual labor. ...