B-Scanner: Store business cards digitally

With technology moving forward in leaps and bounds to digitise and streamline our lives, there is still one area of doing business that remains at the Gutenberg days of print and paper: the humble business card. We all have our own collection of other people’s cards somewhere in the recesses of our drawers, or for the more technologically advanced- in our spinning roladex. We also keep our own cards on hand to pass out at impromptu business functions with bad canapes and even worse small talk.

Now, you may not have come to this realisation without some initial prompting, but wouldn’t it be great if you didn’t have to rely on keeping these miniturised cards (which inevitably get lost whenever you fumble around for your similarly shaped rail pass) in order to keep in touch with someone you’ve just met? Enter the B-Scanner, a concept device designed to scan business cards so you won’t lose the details of that CEO who promised you a new job at last night’s function.

While on the surface this may sound a touch gimmicky, the B-Scanner will save you squinting at 3-point font to manually input people’s details into your PDA/ smartphone. It does what technology has set out to do: it takes a mundane, manual task and digitalises it to make life simpler and quicker.

To use this nifty little gadget, you simply need to slide a standard size business card into the machine and an image capture is then stored in its memory. Using a small wheel iPod-style, you can then scan and flick through your list of contacts. You shouldn’t need to worry about any blurring letters with all details appearing on an OLED screen which sharp enough for that smallest of text used for printing copyright information.

The portability of this device means that you can be out and about and still have on hand the email address of a potential business ally who you were supposed to get in contact with that day, but forgot. If their business card is still lying on your desk at the office while you’re at a strategic meeting at the pub, the B-Scanner will really come into its element.

Problems with this idea arise if you work in the design industry for example. Many companies are aiming for a quirkier facade, meaning their business cards have to match. If you receive a card in the shape of a dog or one that has made textile use of cotton wool, the B-Scanner won’t be much use to you as it can only accommodate standard shape cards. If you work for a construction company that has used raised letters in the same colour as the card’s background, the scanner won’t pick up those details either.

All in all, this is a really interesting gadget idea, but with the popularity of convergent technologies on the market, I would say that its only way into the production line is to become part of an existing piece of kit such as a smartphone, so you don’t need to explain that you’ve got an extra pocket just for your business card scanner.

Source: Yanko Design