Although the vast majority of people now carry mobile phones, PDAs, laptops or netbooks that can be used to store a contact list that can be synchronised between computers, physical business cards are still is common usage. Manually inputting the contact details from these cards into your address book can be chore, but ABBYY Business Card Reader for iPhone can help to automate the process.

Taking advantage of the iPhone’s built in camera, and ABBYY’s proven track record in OCR (optical character recognition), the app enables you to take a photograph of a business card and automatically create a contact based on the text that has been detected.

If a contact with some of the same details already exists, you have the option of either creating a new contact, or merging the details into a single entry. The app can be used to look up contacts on Facebook and provides a quick and easy way to consolidate your address books.

ABBYY Business Card Reader is available as both a free and paid for version. The key differences between the two versions are that the paid for edition can be used to search additional social networks such as Twitter and LinkedIn, and the fact that additional contact details will be extracted from a business card photo.

Pay a visit to the ABBYY Business Card Reader web site to find out more.