Evernote, a Web software client that captures data online, data scanned in and even recognizes handwritten notes, could be just what you need to organize your business cards. Evernote has software for Windows and Mac users that allow people to download photos, notes scribbled on scrap paper and business cards among other things, and then search for phrases or words on those real-world items on their computer or phone.
For those who are used to the “Search” and “Find” features giving instant gratification, Evernote will alleviate your frustration in not being able to search your magazine clippings and business cards. Your brain only has so much capacity for remembering things; Evernote is like an external hard drive for your brain.
You can clip part of a Web page or take a photo of a wine label, upload it into the software where it’s archived, then you can later search for whatever terms were on the wine label, such as “milk sake.” Even if you handwrote “milk sake” on the wine label, Evernote will recognize the text and bring up that wine label. Evernote even reads cursive writing. Awesome.
Here’s how Evernote works:
1. You capture what you what to remember by using your computer, phone or camera, and uploading it into the software.
2. Everything is run through Evernote’s recognition technology and Evernote synchronizes it across all of your devices. You can organize your info into notebooks and create tags for items so that they’re easier to find later.
3. Later, you search or filter in Evernote for whatever words are associated with the item you’re trying to remember, and Evernote brings up the photo, Web page, etc. that you uploaded.
You can even record audio and listen to it later! This is so good. You don’t have to type anything from your handwritten note into the software – its image recognition software can read just about anything. I would think if you have really bad handwriting, it wouldn’t work, but from this photo it looks like it does!
That’s CEO Libin holding on to that ticket.
You can keep track of receipts, business cards, anything that has text on it. You can actually keep track of photos with no text as long as you add a tag to describe it.
Once the software is on your phone, anytime you take a picture it automatically goes into the Evernote software – you don’t have to do a thing after taking the picture unless you want to add tags to it.
So, once you scan or take photos of all your business cards, you can later go into Evernote, type in the name or business name and get the card you scanned or photographed earlier in its entirety. The only caveat with this software is that it can’t read PDFs, so you’ll have to save your images as JPEGS or PNG files.
The Evernote interface looks pretty simple to use and gives you nice details, such as the dates you made the notes. Pretty handy if you get into a habit of taking a pic of a business card the same day you receive it.
A 1-year premium subscription costs $45 which gives you more security and higher uploading limits than the free version. Still, the free version gives you 40MB per month which is probably plenty for your non-business needs.
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