Traveling Geeks

If CardScan, CaptureTalk and MagicSolver Had a Baby…

by Susan Bratton on July 15, 2009 at 3:47 pm

I returned from the Traveling Geeks trip to London and Cambridge with over 100 business cards and more emails streaming in with contact information. I spent a couple hours scanning the cards into my CardScan scanner. If my computer hadn’t needed a hard restart, I’d still have that data, but I had to reboot and lost everything! That’s not the worst, as if a couple hours of tedious work wasted wasn’t enough, even when I do rescan them, I must laboriously go to LinkedIn and Facebook and “friend” each person. This could take me another 2-3 hours. I just can’t take it anymore.

Here’s what I want.

I meet you. You have a simple business card you carry with you that I take a photo of with my iPhone. It uses mobile OCR technology to automatically add you into my Apple Address Book (a piece of crap that thing, but Apple and databases is a whole other bitch session) which backs up virtually to my MobileMe account.

Next, this ap you are creating for me (thank you so very much!)  takes all the new contacts and automatically friends them on Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, Twitter and anyplace else I’ve selected in my settings.

Then it tags each person in my Trackur online reputation monitoring (like Google Alerts but better) account so I can see if there’s anything interesting about them anytime I communicate with them on any of the social services, including surfacing their latest online breadcrumbs in my Apple Mail as I’m writing to them.

My friend, CC Chapman, bought me two Pokens to play with. These are little automatic data exchangers that you can take to events and exchange info with friends, come back and upload via USB to your computer. But nobody has little Pokens. Everybody has a mobile phone!

So, if CardScan and CaputuraTalk and MagicSolver had a baby, they could create what I need. (I met Iansyst (CapturaTalk’s maker) and MagicSolver in Cambridge – they are part of the tech start up world in England.

CardScan has the business card OCR technology. CapturaTalk has mobile OCR technology. MagicSolver uses neural networks and vision technologies to solve Sudoku puzzles by taking a picture of the puzzle with your phone. Surely these companies can come together to solve the massive problem we all have keeping track of our contacts and connecting with them in social nets?

What do you say Mark Ketchum of Newell Rubbermaid (owners of Cardscan)? The last CEO was ousted after 10 bad quarters. You are in charge of the turn around. The CardScan as a stand alone item just doesn’t cut it. Why don’t you aquire some of these amazing technology companies and get with the program? We want to bridge from handing out business cards to digitally exchanging information that automatically syncs with our socnets.

It’s time for a new ap! And don’t forget Symbian and Nokia – the iPhone is still just a small part of the global business grist.

From Iansyst:

Please find below details about our mobile OCR and text-to-speech solution for people with learning difficulties. Please find below a link to the BBC website where you can see a clip about capturatalk: What is Capturatalk? CapturaTalk is an innovative software package designed to operate on a range of Windows Mobile phones to access information and to support anytime anywhere learning. This is ideal for people who require literacy support for disabilities such as dyslexia, or for those learning English.

Capturatalk v2 uses proven leading technology to deliver the following quality features:

·Scan and recognise text using Abbyy Mobile OCR.

·Deliver text-to-speech with natural-sounding voices by Acapela.

·Understand what words mean using the concise Oxford English Dictionary.

·Capturatalk v2 supports mobile learning by reading out text from most applications on your Windows Mobile Device including:

·Email ·Tasks ·Reminders ·Appointments ·Pocket Word ·Notes ·Pocket Internet Explorer

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