Corex upgrades CardScan

You met scores of people at Nasscom 2002, and want to touch base with the ones in your city. So you laboriously pore over your visiting-cards folder to filter out the people in your city. But what if you could scan those cards into your system and search through them based on the name of the person or the city of location? Better still, what if you could store this information on the Web and access it from wherever you were? Corex CardScan 600c, a visiting-card scanner that comes with its own software, lets you do both.

Like the earlier version–CardScan 500–once you scan a visiting card, the built-in OCR engine recognizes the text and puts it into categories like name, designation, address or e-mail. You can create your own categories, too. This information is then stored in CardScan’s proprietary database format, CDB, and you can export it to other databases or devices like your PDA or notebook. You can also store a color image of the card (the earlier version stored black-and-white ones) and add short notes, like when you met that person.

If the visiting card has text on the back, you can scan the back of the card, too, and choose to save text from either side. 

Other useful features are the ability to search for contacts by name, city and other criteria; e-mail or call a person from within the database; or print labels directly with all or some of the fields in your database. This version is also 40% smaller than the earlier version.

In CardScan 600c, you can store your contacts file on the CardScan.Net Web server, and then use a username and password to access it from wherever you are. Any changes you make to this file will automatically be reflected in the file stored on your PC. To share your contacts file with someone, you have to give him your username and password.

The new version connects to your PC via USB, while the earlier one connected via USB or parallel port.

Pragya Madan in Mumbai