Regardless how digital the world has become today, business cards are still an essential tool for any business setting. At our last Startup Asia Jakarta conference, I collected at least 300 business cards.
Sure, I have made 300 new connections. But that doesn’t mean I have their contacts in order. Even if I do keep the cards in my drawer, it is still a hassle to search for a contact one card at a time. This can all be solved with YCard, a mobile app that was recently introduced to me when I visited Youlu’s headquarters.
YCard has been awesome as I’ve tried over the last 24 hours. Managing your business cards is as simple as point, shoot, and save. YCard’s ability to detect the right information is pretty impressive. Zany Zeng, co-founder of Youlu explains that the app uses OCR technology to detect and classify information like name, company, mobile contact, address etc. It also has human verification to ensure that the information is correctly detected. YCard will also learn to recognize business cards more accurately as its engine detects business cards with similar designs. A business card takes anywhere from one minute to an hour to be digitally recognized.
Users can also group contacts into customized categories like clients, friends, partners etc which I thought is really helpful. With the business card digitized, searching for a specific contact becomes uber easy. Digitized contacts can also be saved into your phone’s address book. For iPhone users, that means the contact will be saved onto your Apple Contact app and synced with your other Apple gadgets.
Besides Chinese (Simplified and traditional), YCard is also available in English, Korean, and Japanese
Youlu is a startup founded by Zany Zeng, Richard Robinson, and two other ex-Sohu entrepreneurs. The team is currently based in Beijing with 60 over team members. Besides YCard, the team also built Youlu, a smarter smart phone address book and YConnect, a mobile-centric professional social network.
All three apps are interconnected but I would vote for YCard as my favorite app among the three. Here are some links to download YCard, Youlu, and Yconnect. They are all worth a try.
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