DYMO has a variety of unique gift ideas for the busy executive or business owner on your list. Know a professional who is swamped with business cards? Then perhaps they will enjoy the CardScan Executive by DYMO.
CardScan Executive – $259.99
CardScan Executive is a small scanner that records the information on business cards to save in a digital format. DYMO sent us a CardScan Executive to try out, and it’s an interesting little device. To set it up, we installed the software, plugged the scanner in, and right away the computer recognized the device, so the installation went very smoothly. To use, you open the software, feed the cards through the scanner, and it pops up a scan of the card right away. What impressed Jai is that is has OCR software, which does its best at looking at the image, interpreting what actual letters & words are, and does a really good job of guessing which things go in which fields. If it gets it wrong, you can correct it. How accurate CardScan gets it depends on the layout of the card, If you use a card with a clean layout, it gets it right pretty much each time. If the card has a lot of graphics on it or really unusual fonts, it was still pretty accurate, but would put things in the wrong field or not know how to parse it.
Jai was amazed at how you could have your name, address and fax number in different places, yet it was still really accurate in guessing which went where. For example, it could often tell the difference between a person’s name and the name of an organization, without it being labeled on the card. We took screenshots of both of our business cards scanned into the program, so you can see how they turned out – there were a few inaccuracies in our phone numbers and addresses, but I blocked our personal info out for obvious reasons!
Here’s Jai’s card:
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Here’s my card:
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I couldn’t see using a device like this personally, but this could be efficient for the person who has just come back from a convention with a large collection of business cards. Jai didn’t have high expectations, but he thought it was pretty cool after he tried it out!
DYMO CardScan Executive is available for for $259.99 and can be found at a variety of retailers, just in time for Christmas – click here to find a store near you.
This would put an end to all of hubby’s biz. cards lying all over the counter…..neat product. Thanks for the review.
As well as the executive reviewed here there is also a personal version which is smaller and portable, and – coming early 2011 – the ‘cardscan team’ which is a network version to be shared in the office. Only the Executive works on the Mac though.
I could see this working really well in small businesses too!
My husband might benefit from this has he is in business school and is always business executives and people of the sort.