Anyone who attends conferences or frequently meets new people for work knows the frustration of business card data entry. Reading and entering contact information into a laptop or mobile device is dreary and too often required work. There are business card scanners on the market that claim to make life easier. But they generally have a hardware component - meaning one more thing to carry - and don't really work.

ABBYY, a Russian company formed nearly two decades ago that has grown to 600 employees, introduced a new version of a mobile optical character recognition (OCR) utility. Their software captures data using your smartphone's camera, automatically extracts contact information including phone numbers, company names and email addresses, and intelligently populates your address book.

What makes this utility different from others on the market is that it works -- flawlessly on a variety of cards we threw at it. Despite differing card layouts and even foreign names and addresses, the software correctly identified fields and entered information without spelling errors. There is an easy method for correcting mistakes, which was demonstrated to us. But the magic of ABBYY's software is that you really don't need it.

Unfortunately, while a fully functioning Windows Mobile version exists, it's not being made available directly to consumers. The ABBYY Mobile OCR software development toolkit (SDK) is for license to developers only, who ABBYY anticipates will implement it in a variety of end user applications.

Software developers take notice!

This utility works on cameras with 2 or more megapixels. ABBYY's SDK supports a variety of platforms.

Check out this exclusive video of ABBYY's Mobile OCR in action!

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ABBYY develops OCR / ICR / OMR, data capture and linguistic software