Convenient Archive to Recognise and Store Business Cards Frees iPhone® Users from Unnecessary Clutter in their Address Books

Bracknell, UK (01 November, 2011) - ABBYY®, a leading provider of document recognition, document capture, and linguistic technologies and services, today announced the availability of ABBYY CardHolder for iPhone, an on-device digital “card case” for accurate capture and convenient archiving and using of business cards. The application allows iPhone users to easily work with information on business cards without the need of transferring all contacts directly into the iPhone address book. While avoiding unnecessary clutter in their address book, users can capture and save for later any type of contact data they encounter on a daily basis, including not only business-related information but all aspects and needs of everyday life - contacts of restaurants, cafes, local taxi services, stores, beauty parlours and many more. With ABBYY’s award-winning Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology and extended language support, CardHolder also enables customers to instantly use contact data from a business card when browsing the captured image on the iPhone screen - they can make a call, send an SMS message or an e-mail right away.

ABBYY CardHolder transfers images of business cards taken with the iPhone camera to a convenient archive with quick and easy search, sorting and grouping capabilities. The application recognises contact information on a card (First Name, Last Name, Company Name, Job title, phones, faxes and e-mail addresses) and provides the ability to edit the results, including contact data classification.

“ABBYY continues to bring the benefits of OCR to a wider audience. Our new ABBYY CardHolder simplifies one of the most common usage scenarios by making the storage of business cards easy and convenient for the user. This easy-to-use digital card case with recognition technologies is perfect for business, entertainment and everyday life contacts”, said Katya Solntseva, director of Mobile Products Department at ABBYY.

The application recognises text in 20 languages, including both monolingual and multilingual business cards. It also provides an intuitive user interface. Each image of a photographed business card has touchable buttons for additional functions, so that a user can dial up a phone number, send an e-mail and SMS, or activate any link with just a single tap. The CardHolder also allows the iPhone user to make a back-up copy of recognised images of business cards within its own archive for any reason - for instance, to transfer stored data to another phone or PC using iTunes synchronisation.

iPhone users can upgrade ABBYY CardHolder for iPhone with a set of additional capabilities to manage recognised contacts. The upgraded application allows users to choose either the archive, or the iPhone address book (or both at the same time) as a storage place for business cards and provides an instant search for information about new contacts across mapping services and popular social and business networks such as Twitter®, Facebook® and LinkedIn®. The upgrade can be purchased from within the application.

Availability
ABBYY CardHolder for iPhone is available via the Apple AppStore (accessible through iTunes®). Supported interface languages are English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Russian. Supported devices include the Apple® iPhone 3GS and 4 (OS 3.1 or later) with autofocus cameras.

For more information about the product, visit www.abbyy.com/cardholder_iphone.