Catshanghai

How many business cards have you collected since you came to Shanghai?

My wallet should be bulging with cash. Instead it is full of rubbish and business cards or mingpians as they are called in China. Every shop, restaurant and individual will present you with their name card in an elaborate two handed exchange ritual copied from the Japanese. I get so many mingpians that I have to skim my wallet every now and again, but that means I can not always look up important numbers when I need to get to them after an unexpected turn of events.

Are there any digital solutions?

Organised Shanghaiistas will type everybody’s contact details into their computer or cellphone address books. This is no big chore for entering E-mail addresses and telephone numbers, but it’s not so efficient if you want to make a note of someone’s long address…in Chinese.

This is where Evernote can help. I have been using this web based note taking service to keep photos of business cards I upload or E-mail. I simply snap a picture of a business card with my cellphone and E-mail it to my Evernote account using a secret address they give to you when you sign up. I point my cellphone browser to preview.evernote.com whenever I need to find a business card, although I have only scanned in two so far.

Evernote recognises text in your images, which you can search for. It would be fantastic if it had Chinese character recognition and translation built in or supported through APIs, but this is not yet available. It would also be great if Evernote updated Google contacts after scanning a business card, but this software is not there yet.

Scanning business cards may seem like a very useful mobile or general software tool, but Evernote is more of a web clipping application. I have been using the software to grab and categorise parts of webpages, which I share with students when there is a bandwidth crunch. See this post I wrote on my other blog, Biterati.

Evernote is still in private beta, but I have a few spare invites if anyone has trouble getting an account.