Someone can make money from this!
By DavidFisher. Filed in technology |Tags: business cards, cards, delicious monster, isight, money, ocr, opportunity, os x, scanning
I always figure that I have decent business ideas. Here’s one for someone that would simply rock! Someone can make money off this if they are smart (and if they are smart and nice then they could share with me!)
There needs to be a small and lightweight program for OS X that allows you to simply hold a business card in the air near the built in iSight camera on Macs, and then takes a photo of the business card, and does OCR on it, and throws the information (and a photo of the card for backup) into Apple’s Address Book.
It can’t be THAT hard. Delicious Monster has people using the iSight as a barcode scanner. The API for making the computer take photos isn’t that bad. There’s some open source OCR stuff out there, and getting junk into address book isn’t rocket science either.
I currently have about 1000 business cards to input into a computer. I COULD always just get a business card scanner, but I already have a camera on my iSight. If I’m at a conference with my computer, I could just slide the cards past the iSight and boom. It’s done.
Other cool idea: Business cards with RFID tags in them, all with the same radio frequency (per person). Just slide the physical card over an RFID reader, and the software could go online and fetch their information (from a public site they put it on that’s associated with the number) and/or add them to LinkedIn.