Take a look at the video above (which oddly reminds me of the early 90s) and you’ll see that IBM has taken a page from Evernote’s book.
Its research labs have been working on a project codenamed “PENSIEVE” that promises to algorithmically construct digital address books from photographs of business cards and the people they represent.
While not production ready for at least another year, PENSIEVE will get rid of that stack of business cards sitting unhelpfully on your desk. Instead of chipmunking business cards away, PENSIEVE users can take photos of them with their camera phones upon receipt. Later, when they plug those phones into their computers, PENSIEVE will analyze the photos and extract contact information - name, phone number, address, etc. - and associate their data with any photos you took of people on location. That data gets integrated into your digital address book, making it searchable, shareable and generally more useful.
IBM won’t offer PENSIEVE directly to consumers; the company plans to distribute the service through its telco partners. Pricing details are also not available, since they are bound to be determined by the mobile providers themselves.
We’re told the service will sync with common address books (Outlook, etc). Let’s just hope the data doesn’t get into the wrong hands.
Why not just beam your contact info from one cell phone to another
Yeah. K.I.S.S.
Pretty Soon people won’t need Biz Cards …
doesn’t scanr.com already do this?
Looks old School to me
For those who are curious, the name is indeed a reference to Harry Potter.
Good to see I am not the only one, because that’s all I could think of the whole time watching this video.
I think I’ve witnesses this kind of thing before. Is this an innovation or an imitation of IBM???
Seems like their “ideation” session wasn’t very productive. That’s relatively easy to do and it’s been done before.
Evernote offers a similar service and with a lot of extra features like handwriting recognition and tagging.
That’s an extremely interesting project
http://tinyurl.com/BUSINESSCARDREVIEW
This is silly. You can’t just whip your phone out after meeting someone and say “i need a picture of you”. I’d put my hand on their camera and ask they not take it.
I can’t believe the marketing people at IBM let the name of this product thru..all the potential misspellings/misreadings make it a marketing minefield..
“I can’t believe the marketing people at IBM let the name of this product thru..all the potential misspellings/misreadings make it a marketing minefield..” X 2.
The jokes are inevitable.
Unfortunately, IBM very much sucks at making promotional videos. Cool idea, gay video. (Gay - not in the “derogatory reference to homosexuals” sense of the word, but gay - as in the only adjective suitable for describing something this overproduced and ultimately lame.) C’mon it’s 2008! Do people really find the gratuitous revolving 3D orb impressive? It almost feels like parody. I’ll stick with Evernote.
Many LG cell phones all ready have this feature.
circa 80s man!
Why can’t we beam business cards from the iPhone with IR like the Palm devices all can? I know IR isn’t in anymore, but it’s a low power way to securely transmit that data and it was almost like a virtual handshake.
its called bluetooth
Pretty lame. Who is going to take a picture of someone that just met. Kinda creepy.
Shira - I agree with u ..Thingz should be moving forward not backward ..
I guess cell phones should come with a feature that lets you create a biz card in your phone and then let you beam it to other peoples phones or social networks or wherever they want it sent to …
Some cell phones do have this feature
desktop is dead.
Isn’t this like what Thrrum does?
http:///www.thrrum.com
Holy crap please talk faster.
This would be a great addon to Linkedin.
When I clicked on this link from my feed reader, I thought oh, a story about IBM and their penis envy….. weird
where are all the visionaries? crap.
This requires you to modify your behavior and take pictures of everything. Doubtful that it will catch on.
cool IBM tech marketed badly
You can’t get rid of business cards - that’s like getting rid of newspapers and magazines; it’s not going to go away for the immediate future.
Wow, my OLD Sony Ericsson P910 or 990 was doing this some time ago (couple of years back). IBM likes to talk. Just do it.
isn’t it just easier to email each other with signatures
http://www.scanr.com has been doing this for a while. Nothing new.
With all that bandwidth you’d think they would do something more than take a picture of card and WAIT for a PC-Phone synch.
I usually get home and plug new business cards in to the address book on my Mac by typing them in. Call me crazy, but this actually works.
Seriously though, if you receive that many new cards that it’s a PITA to enter in a new address, then chances are you should stop socializing and maybe get some real work done? Yes, I’m looking at you senior management.
CardIris already does this the biz card piece. I tried it with a couple cards at their booth at some tradeshow and it worked pretty well. Two things stood out as cool:
* It keeps an image of the original card, not just the OCR text
* You can put 10 cards on a normal flatbed scanner, and it will slice them up into separate cards
http://www.irislink.com/c2-110.....8211;.aspx
once again IB= Is.Behind.Mobile
if this is there answer to getting into the mobile market then they are light years behind. They got some real stiffs up there at ibm. This commercial reminded me of A Futuristic Commerical on a Movie In the 90’s. And its complicated for no reason.
Oh … Business Cards are going away …
Remember the Typewriter and the 35mm Cameras
What’s a business card?
@glen, a business card is a small rectangular piece of paper that guys with ties give each other. In my next post I’ll explain what a tie is.
I luv how the Japanese present business cards!!
What’s a penis sieve?
Was it called CardScan?
I think business cards will continue to stick around, so what is the easiest way to deal with them? What about the inclusion of a QR code on the card itself, like what we now see with postage. All the information could be scanned, by a cell phone ideally, and made available in the contact app of your choice.
I’m not sure how JKRowling will like this name!
Indeed, like mentioned, QR Codes already do this - in a very secure way. You can either encode information in an offline code (no need of a server) or you can store all the information on a server and link to it via QR Code.
We do this already (vcard data is protected)
http://qrcode.kaywa.com/img.ph.....om%2Froger
Kaywa doesnt work on all phones i.e most motorolas, samsungs, sagems how is that ever going to be a solution when you exclude so many people?
Hi,
Three responses to that.
a) Some devices are not yet ready for a QR Code reader. If the camera lens is too bad and the mobile internet capabilities are severly limited, it doesn’t make sense to make a reader. The good thing, this is less and less the case, but some handset companies would need a push to open up their architecture so that a good QR Code Reader can be installed.
b) More readers will come in the future.
c) But as QR Codes are an universal format, you can read them with several QR Code Readers: there are more than 7 readers on the market as long as we talk about URL’s. So if you do not find your phone on the Kaywa Reader page, you’ll sure to find your device elsewhere.
That’s the great thing about an official and worldwide ISO-Standard. No company alone can create such a huge market, but every company benefits from the others around.
1. Collect business card
2. Try to remember where you put business card
3. Send LinkedIn invite
4. Toss business card in the trash
Now if only LinkedIn would come up with a decent sync to Exchange I’d be a happy guy.
Cool idea - what about making sure your business card also gets saved - my problem is that I want to make sure people don’t lose my business card, click on my sites, and connect on my networks
(friends and I built myDropcard.com for that, but there’s several solutions out there, includin gLinxCard.com)
Have to agree, the video did seem like something from the early 90s (if not Orwellian). However, it made its point clear and it sounds like a useful tool.
Throwing a quick shoutout there as well - we’ve also built a similar service using SMS, called rmbrME: http://www.rmbrME.com which is significantly more socially enabled than a biz card photo/scanning approach. As @Tal mentioned above, there are others!
We built it mostly because I find the post-processing of bizcards super annoying - and not a whole lot of fun. It seems to me that what you really want to do is skip the physical card entirely (if possible) and go right to the socially networked card.
-G
NeatReceipts also does this.
did any else find this odd: “later, when they plug those phones into their computers”.
FAIL right there. i’ve never synched my blackberry or other phone to my computer. Maybe if it works via bluetooth they will have something.
I need another coffee. on first read I thought it was called peni*envy
Hey IBM ppl gone mad or what….WTF,does this project make any sense
This is so stupid.. I mean with RFID business cards which can feed in data directly to your cellphone, this idea sounds prehistoric!