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How does the Travellady keep up with all the people in her life?By Madelyn Miller, the TravelLadyAfter my last trip, I had14,000 contacts, over 200 travellady.com contributors, and a huge extended family of cousins and friends I love as much as family. I do not have a partridge in a pear tree, and would not even want one. With me gone so much, who would feed and water the darn thing. What I do have is a CardScan business card scanner.
So I borrowed CardScan. It was not hard to set up (I think even the CardScan device was a bit overwhelmed by the quantity of contacts.) My computer wizard, Mark Wilson helped me, and even he was impressed by how well it “read” the cards we fed it. I had just come back from Italy, I learned that CardScan can read Italian and even manages to put the fax, phone, website and email in the right places. It was amazingly accurate. We challenged the CardScan with some more creative cards. It really can read colors and pictures and sort through blocks of color and logos. It was probably 90 per cent or more accurate (much more accurate than my typing, especially when tired), and Mark figured out that the direction you fed the card into the scanner made a difference. (a geek seems to know stuff like that. I would never have tried feeding CardScan in different directions. At my house, you are lucky to get fed.) If you lined it up perfectly, it did a better job. Takes a left brain to even think about things like that.
CardScan could even read the “fine print” that was hard for me to read without glasses. On my last trip to Florida, I took the CardScan with me so I could catch up, thinking I would convince my nieces to enter some cards for me, since it is truly so easy a child could do it. My love and appreciation of CardScan is evidenced by the fact that it earned a spot in my carry on luggage—I would hate to lose it. And it is so small it could be carried in your hand and weighs only 8 ounces. What Is New With CardscanWhile I was busy entering cards, the company has come out with lots of neat new stuff. CardScan Inc., the people who created CardScan, introduced a significantly enhanced and completely redesigned version of CardScan® Executive, the best-selling business card reader in the market according to the NPD Group/NPD Techworld, which is 50 percent faster, lighter and smaller than its predecessor and incorporates numerous significant new features and user-requested improvements. CardScan Executive scans and uploads data from a business card into the appropriate fields of a database without typing. It gives even the most demanding users the ability to incorporate and update contact information into all leading contact management programs such as Outlook® Act, and Goldmine and synchronizes data to multiple electronic devices including Palm™, Pocket PCs, Blackberrys and smartphones. The company also added a new model to the CardScan family, the CardScan Personal, specifically designed for users with basic needs in contact management.
If this is true, it means I collect more cards per month than I could possibly have time to type into my computer even if I never slept. Perhaps this explains why I was so behind. Is there a similar statistic as to why I am so behind on cleaning my loft? “We have confidently extended our market leadership through the changes and improvements we’ve made to our CardScan product line,” said Peter J. Weyman, president of CardScan Inc. “Our world-class development team has been perfecting our proprietary technology for more than ten years making it even easier to use. Now users can choose the CardScan model that best fits their needs while still enjoying the high levels of accuracy, speed and functionality they have come to expect from their CardScan.” |
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super networking contact, Ken Stone, Director of Sales and Marketing at the
Wydham Peaks Resort in Telluride, told me it was an amazing time saver. Anything
that saves time, interests me. And the totally fit Ken seems to have high
standards. If it worked for him, maybe I could get myself organized, if not in
perfect physical shape.
CardScan
can even read chocolate cards. I was at the chocolate festival in New York and
brought home a bunch of cards to scan. I am sure it would do just as well with
vanilla or strawberry, but chocolate is my favorite flavor.
According
to CardScan Inc.’s own research, an average user who accumulates 30 cards each
month over a three-year period spends 30 hours or nearly four full work days
typing contact information into address books or PDAs.