8 business card apps for smartphones: Scan 'em and store 'em

If you're like me, here's what happens after a business event: You collect a pocket full of business cards, but never have a chance to enter the pile of cards into your contacts. A week later, you need to get back to one of the contacts and have to start searching through the piles. Isn't there a better way?

Turns out that yes, there is. Rather than muddle through the manual labor of typing in each card's contact info, let your smartphone do the heavy lifting for you. Business card scanning apps take your cell phone's rear-facing camera and put it to work as a scanner. These apps typically take a photograph of the card and perform optical character recognition (OCR) on the image to translate the contents to editable text. They then add that info to the app's own database, to your smartphone's contacts listing or both. Most of these apps will also retain the original image for reference.

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