Business Card Scanners:

People get scanned all the time. People are scanned in hospitals, in the airport, in shopping malls, etc. Scanning through modern technology is a way of skimming through a certain object to check for items hidden from plain view. But did you know that scanning is also a way of extracting data and information from a certain printed surface? And that business cards frequently pass through a scanner too?

The term “business card scanner” can mean two different things. The first one, the definition most commonly associated with the term, refers to an electronic apparatus designed to capture and convert actual physical data into digital information. So in basic terms it works sort of like a printer in reverse. A printer converts digital data by printing it out on an actual physical paper, creating a hard copy.

A scanner, on the other hand, shifts the entire process around by providing a soft copy of the information obtained from a hard copy. First the scanner does this by digitally scanning the surface of a business card. This is similar to how a photocopier machine works. Then the scanner converts the acquired text or image into any one of the many formats commonly used by popular word processors (.doc, .odt, etc); the end format depends on the user settings when the scanning process was first initiated. You may now view the scanned business card on your monitor.

The second definition for business card scanner refers to a computer software specially designed to extract data from a certain piece of document, usually a business card.

The business card is swiped using a small electronic apparatus. This apparatus is then connected to a computer running the software, which in turn segregates the acquired data into their respective fields. This is particularly useful when large volumes of data need to be extracted from several business cards quickly to be transferred to a computer.