New Vizibility study finds defect rates as high as 36% among the top three card scanning apps
NEW YORK, July 8, 2014 /PRNewswire/ — Vizibility (http://vizibility.com), the leader in cloud-based mobile business cards, today announced the results of its independent analysis of three of the most popular business card scanning applications: Evernote, FullContact, and the Neat Scanner. The study was done in light of LinkedIn's announcement that it will discontinue its CardMunch application on July 11, 2014 and migrate users to Evernote's business card scanning service.
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Business card scanning machines and apps have been on the market for about two decades, with hundreds of business card scanning apps available on iTunes and Google Play today. People use these solutions because they want to save time by automatically scanning the content of business cards into their digital address books. Unfortunately, many of these apps are inefficient because they cause significant errors that must be detected and corrected by their users. See the infographic of the study results.
To quantify the defect rate of business card scanning apps, Vizibility randomly collected and scanned 100 business cards from a variety of professions. All cards were scanned in a controlled environment under optimum lighting conditions. Each scan was then evaluated for accuracy based on the percent of characters translated accurately. Key findings include:
- FullContact (86.96% accuracy rate) was the most accurate in capturing information, with Neat Scanner (79.14%) coming in second and Evernote (64.4%) having the lowest accuracy rating.
- Evernote's business card scanning feature is limited to iOS users at this time.
- Transparent cards and those with unique designs do not scan.
- The scanner apps can only scan one side of a business card, sometimes forcing you to choose which information not to import.
- Complete company names rarely imported, instead using just the name from the logo or a shorter variation, even when humans are involved in the translation. FullContact was the best at company names, getting them right 83% of the time, followed by Neat Scanner at 44% and Evernote getting company names right just 27% of the time.
- Websites and URLs are often deleted, almost always by Evernote. FullContact imports the URL accurately 94% of the time, Neat Scanner 73% and Evernote only imports the website 1% of the time.
- Tag lines including regulatory statements that are mandatory for lawyers never make it into the contact record.
- Phone numbers are usually translated accurately, although not always assigned correctly as work, fax and mobile. Looking at accuracy of recording a phone number as work versus mobile versus fax, FullContact was the most accurate, correctly assigning the numbers 94% of the time, followed by Neat by 78% and Evernote at 70%.
- Vizibility's pre-scanned business cards are 100% accurate.
"Would you print your business cards riddled with typos or with key information missing? Of course not. Yet the people we give our business cards to are importing inaccurate information when they scan them, making it harder for them to reach us," said James Alexander (http://viz.me/james), Vizibility's founder and Division President. "For the foreseeable future we will continue to live in a hybrid world of paper business cards and the electronic address books where we want the information on those cards to reside. Text is not machine-readable with repeatable accuracy. Even scanning apps with human intervention fail more than 12% of the time."
Pre-Scan Your Business Card and Ensure 100% Accuracy
Vizibility's vizCard is like a pre-scanned business card hosted in the cloud, ensuring that professionals can reconnect and re-engage with clients and prospects. The vizCard stores and shares 100% accurate contact information, website addresses, LinkedIn and Facebook connections and more, and can be updated in real-time. With Vizibility, people can even subscribe to business cards, automatically receiving updated vCards so their address book is always up-to-date. And vizCard users receive alerts whenever their pre-scanned business card is downloaded.
About the Study
Evernote, FullContact and Neat Scanner were selected because they represent the three basic services offered by business card scanner apps. Like similar apps, they all function in one of these three basic ways: using your phone's camera to take a picture of the business card (Evernote and FullContact), Evernote uses software to automatically translate the information on the card into a contact record, while FullContact submits the image to a live human to manually translate the information into a new contact record for you. The Neat Scanner is a physical scanner attached to your computer or laptop that comes with a companion software application. Like Evernote, Neat uses its own software to automatically translate the information into a contact record on your computer. All three services host data in the cloud so it can be accessed from any browser.
About Vizibility LLC
Vizibility LLC, a division of ALL-STATE LEGAL, delivers the first enterprise-class identity management and engagement platform for mobile. Vizibility's highly acclaimed vizCard™ addresses today's reality that the first impression a company or individual makes is often online, and in many cases on a mobile device. Vizibility enables people to package and share their online presence to make powerful, accurate and lasting impressions. ALL-STATE customers enjoy a bottomless box of business cards so they never run out of cards again. Vizibility operates under U.S. Patents 7,831,609, 7,987,173, 8,095,534, 8,271,650, 8,275,837, 8,280,879 and 8,290,941. Other patents pending.
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