Business Card Reader from SHAPE Services turned an iPhone photograph into contact information. Its purpose was straightforward: reduce the typing involved in transferring a printed business card into the phone’s address book. This restored October 31, 2009 entry looks at that early scanning workflow and the checks that make the resulting contact useful.
What the original product did
An ABBYY announcement dated November 24, 2009 identifies SHAPE Services as the developer and ABBYY Mobile OCR as its text-recognition technology. The app extracted details such as names, telephone numbers and email addresses from photographed cards, then saved the information in the iPhone address book. The announcement listed German, English, French, Italian and Spanish recognition.
The camera mattered. ABBYY reported better results on the iPhone 3GS than the iPhone 3G, pointing to autofocus and higher image resolution. That is historical hardware context, not a claim about how an old edition will perform on a current iPhone.
Check the contact before you rely on it
A readable photo and an accurate contact record are different things. Inspect the spelling of the name and company, check that telephone digits have not been lost, and make sure an email address has its punctuation in the right places. A mistaken character can make an otherwise successful scan unusable.
Keep the original card until those details have been checked. For a useful contact list, it also helps to add your own short note about where you met the person and why you may want to follow up. These are editorial workflow suggestions, not a list of features tested in the 2009 app.
Which Business Card Reader is this?
The contemporary November 2009 listing links to Apple app ID 328175747. SHAPE’s own company page also names Business Card Reader among its products. This identifies the SHAPE application rather than treating every similarly named card scanner as the same software.
The historical U.S. App Store address did not provide an active listing when checked for this restoration. Current purchase availability and compatibility are therefore unverified; the old release’s price, supported devices and language list should not be read as a current offer.