== CARDSCAN ==

More Info.htm

CardScan as a popular business card scanning product has been around now for the better part of 10 years and in a "nutshell" this is probably the single most compelling reason why CardScan products are clear leaders in the market place today. "Experience"
CardScan should be considered a professional business tool for two key reasons. 1. The technology that is employed to read, recognise and categorise the information and 2. The richness of the software to achieve many of the user requirements.

Below explains these two reasons.

Technology

CardScan employs two quite impressive and intimately linked pieces of technology.

1. A super fast and quite accurate "Optical Character Recognition" OCR Engine.
Optical Character Recognition is the technology that allows computer software to recognise and distinguish between the various letters of a standard alphabet even though those letters may appear in one of hundreds of different fonts that are popular. On its own an OCR Engine is of little value because recognising letters is only half the puzzle. The secret is understanding what the meaning behind the letters and knowing what to do with them.

2. A software tool that performs comprehensive "Computational Linguistics".
Computational Linguistics is a fancy phrase for the ability to build and match combinations of letters from the alphabet with comprehensive "look-up tables of words". These "Look-Up Tables" in the case of CardScan have been built up over several years based on a "heuristic(1)" approach of analysing thousands if not millions of business cards and learning how people and businesses identify various elements or pieces of information contained on their business cards. An example is the presence of the "@" symbol in an email address.

Example of what CardScan Software does: In order to identify an email address and put it in the right location in the CardScan database file (.cdb file ). Firstly the OCR Engine identifies the @ symbol out of a multitude of different font types that exist. Once the @ symbol is recognised, the computational linguistics part of the CardScan engine says "For all "Text Strings" identified with an @ symbol and either a ".com" or ".net" or ".com.au" or etc etc put the text string without leading or preceding "spaces" into a field in the database titled "Email Address". This sounds simple to do however it is only when you have tested and enriched your software to handle the hundreds if not thousands of possible combinations of fonts and email address endings that you can start to reliably and accurately place the correct email address in the correct location in the database. Then you have to remember that the email address is just one "element" of 10 or more elements that need to be identified.

<blockquote>
(1) Definition for "heuristic" from www.wikipedia.org

A heuristic is a method to help to solve a problem, commonly informal. It is particularly used for a method that often rapidly leads to a solution that is usually reasonably close to the best possible answer. Heuristics are "rules of thumb", educated guesses, intuitive judgments or simply common sense.
In more precise terms, heuristics stand for strategies using readily accessible, though loosely applicable, information to control problem-solving in human beings and machines.[1].
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heuristic

</blockquote>


== Richness of Software ==

CardScan, has been tested by so many users and has evolved to the current release of Version 8. This evolution over time changing makes the user experience pleasant by making sure the software application is above all, "Simple" and "User friendly". It is not enough for a business card reader to be able to "read, recognise and categorise the information" as explained earlier in the "Technology" section. Software for the purpose of scanning business cards needs to able to perform a multitude of different tasks. The following of which is just a sample of the tasks that are performed well by CardScan.
1. Presenting business card information in a way that allows sorting and filtering of card records based on any one of the fields that make up the list of records.
2. Displaying card images in a range of easy to view methods.
3. A "Quick Search" utility that searches all Cardscan files and all Cardscan database fields within the user interface.
4. The ability to not only export and import card records from other sources and software applications but the ability to comprehensively and sensibly synchronise business card records with other popular software applications such as MS Outlook or popular CRM products like ACT!, Saleslogix, Salesforce.com or even Microsoft Dynamics CRM
5. The ability to comprehensively remove duplicates from a database or update near duplicate business cards by merging correct information with outdated information like updating a persons role or business title/position.
6. Backup business card records locally or on a secure internet site such as https://www.cardscan.net
7. Send emails, even grouped emails
8. Print labels
9. Print Information in a number of useful formats.
10 Customise fields and create your own specific set of categories.

Article written by: Riccardo Tenaglia
-- () 13:59, 16 March 2008 (UTC)