Tuesday, December 20, 2005

CardScan

Since before Tate was born we have been in the habit of sending cards out to people around the holidays. We started with family pictures but quickly shifted to pictures of our kid and now kids. Jess made an amazing card this year so I felt an extra level of need to get a list of people to send cards out to this year. I rummaged through my office and realized that I have a stack of approximately 500 business cards that weren't in my PIM. Holy crap!

I started typing cards in (haha). After three I realized this wasn't going to work. I had heard mixed reviews on card scanners and decided to take the plunge. I ended up buying a CardScan scanner, I crossed my fingers and set everything up. Shawn laughed at me and told me that I would be scanning cards for days.

Surprisingly I blew through the stack in around an hour and have to say that the OCR was amazing. There are certainly some things that don't scan well but in most cases it worked great. I am a big fan.

I think my hesitation to use a card scanner was primarily because of the bad experience with products like Dragon naturally speaking and other voice recognition technologies, which I have to assume have also gotten better since I last checked.

So if you want a card send me your address! Or your business card. ;-)

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