The company claims the software is a truly OS independent technology so it will work with Windows Mobile, Symbian, and Linux based smartphones.

Abbyy maintains its recognition engine has a small enough footprint and resource requirement that it will work easily on mobile phones.

When a user takes a picture of a business card, an application created with Abbyy's SDK can be designed to read the image and identify key fields such as company, name, phone number, and email address. This application can then be linked to an address/phone book application.

Abbyy may well be too late. There are already two rival systems that can achieve the same results. They both work by reading information off a special bar code and into the mobile handset.

One version is the Mobile Tag developed by France's Abaxia. The second is the Shotcode which is now being offered by Dutch company, OP3. The Shotcode was formerly marketed by Bango as the 'Spot'.

Abaxia's product is more efficient. Instead of relying on data contained in the Mobile Tag (or datamatrix) for a user's contact details, Abaxia's software triggers a data (GPRS) session and downloads the information from a server.

That way, if your contact details change, when a user scans your Mobile Tag six months later, he or she still gets your correct phone number. It's very easy to copy a downloaded business card straight into your handset's addressbook, too.

The other good news is that the software required to create your own business card contact details is available free of charge over the net. So far Abaxia's system has been adopted by France Telecom/Orange, Bouygues Telecom (plus the other i-mode alliance companies) and SFR in France

All of the above seem far more practical than embedding a RFID tag into your data card. Using an industry standard - Near Field Communications (NFC) - it is already possible to read data wirelessly from an RFID chip.

In Germany Vodafone already sells the NFC compatible Nokia 3220. The technology could be used for reading business cards but at present is being deployed mainly as a contactless payment system. µ

L'INQ
Mobile Tag site