The people who make IM+ released Business Card Reader late last week, an app which lets you take a photo of a business card and automatically turn it into a contact in your address book.
I spent a couple days with it, as did Techcrunch, and I'll agree that the text recognition software is accurate roughly 80 percent of the time if you take the picture in bright lighting with an iPhone 3GS. That's pretty good, but it does require you to go in and tweak the contact information on most of the cards. So far it's just not as easy as taking the photo and throwing the card away.
Still, for someone like myself who collects business cards like candy on Halloween it really is a great solution. Just take a photo of the business card and the text automagically finds the right fields in the address book entry. What I really love is the photo of the business card itself is copied into the profile photo of the contact, so it's very easy for me just to throw away all my business cards because I have a photo backup of the original.
A couple problems though, the biggest of which is that the app never put the contact's first and last names into the first and last name fields. It always put both names into the last name field. I have my contacts sorted alphabetically by last name and putting the first name into that field got me all screwed up. For example, John Smith would come up under "J" because it thought the last name started with a "J."
There was also a crashing bug I discovered, but I talked to SHAPE Services and they went in and fixed it. Unfortunately, I have no idea which build made it to the App Store.
It's now available for purchase for $5.99.
I'm pretty sure there are some other solutions available, so if you've tried any of them out let us know in the comments how it worked for you.
