Having trouble locating one particular business card from your card folders that contain hundreds or thousands of business cards? Want to ensure your entire team has access to each other's business card folders to improve workplace collaboration. The WorldCard Color by Penpower could be just what you need.

The WorldCard Color has a reasonably powerful scanner, which allows you to not only scan but save the data immediately, thus ensuring it can be accessed by others in your workplace and making information retrieval easier. With support for various data extensions, such as Import/Export/Sync from/to/with Outlook, Palm and Windows Mobile, the WorldCard Color is ideal if you have a huge stack of business cards to scan through each time to get one particular contact detail.

Form Factor

With a small footprint that barely takes a few inches on your desk (and hence quite portable too), the device is a little bigger than an average smart phone. The slot for inserting business cards is reasonably large, so you scan anything which around the size of a business card, even plastic cards such as credit, debit and ID cards. The device also comes with a rubber bottom so it doesn't slip while you scan. On the whole, it gets your job done in seconds.

Performance

To start with, the driver software and user software installation took about 10 minutes to load on a PC with Microsoft XP Professional and a little more than six minutes on a PC with Vista Ultimate.

 

With the device ready for use, I started feeding it business cards. I was impressed when it gave me a scan rate of five cards a minute; however with scans happening so quickly there were a couple of issues that cropped up.

With my first lot of 50 cards scanned both horizontally and vertically, I found an error rate of one in every 10 cards, with errors ranging from misspelled names to incomplete numbers. Rescanning them did the trick. However the cards that kept returning errors needed a manual edit after the third try. What irritated me the most was that if a business card had a photograph on it, the device did not automatically recognise the snap and place it on the contact picture option in the user interface.

And while 15 global languages are supported, there's no support for any Indian language. Which means if you meet a lot of Indian government or government sector officials whose cards are often in Indian languages, this device can't do much for you.

However, the Import to Outlook or any other data extension took me less than five minutes to execute. Another good feature is the Intelligent Card Search, where you simply enter contact details like the name of the person or company, etc, to find the appropriate business card in seconds. When you have hundreds or thousands of cards in your database, this is one useful feature.

Overall, I was pretty happy with the performance considering I scanned almost 250 business cards.

Conclusion

The user interface of the software provided is what you would use most often unless you import the data to another extension. The scanner is worth a one-time investment as you can keep updating your card database and make minor changes whenever required.

To sum up, the WorldCard reader is a fairly good product and could help improve business efficiency, reduce the time wasted in searching for contacts, improve workplace collaboration and create an electronic backup for all your contacts.