WorldCard Mobile business card scanner app review

So do you deal with a lot of business cards? Do you have a Rolodex sitting pretty at your desk? Do you spend a lot of time browsing your card stack to find say, contact details of a nearby car mechanic, only to discover it later in your wallet? If yes, then you have got to buy the WorldCard Mobile app for iPhone.

WorldCard Mobile iPhone AppWorldCard Mobile, developed by PenPower Inc. is a business card scanner and management tool. All one has to do is point the camera and take a picture. The app scans the card using optical character recognition (OCR) to label all the fields of the business card and uploads them to the phone book. Now this is a time saver and a pretty nifty job from the developers, only I wish, I knew of this earlier.

Now all is not gold with the app. I tested about 20 different cards each with different styling, graphics and color combinations and would say almost 80% of the cards were recognized spot-on, except for a few that came with dark color schemes, uncommon names etc. needed manual re-entering.

Also, I noticed that the lighting of the environment in which the cards were captured also affected the recognition and would recommend doing your scans in a brightly lit-up room, when you capture cards using the app.

One more point to be talked about is the user interface of the app. A simpler easy-to-use user interface with intuitive help features will certainly take the app to the next level. The app has already won a lot of deserving accolades and a better UI will certainly prove to be fruitful.

Final thoughts are, if you deal with a lot of business cards, then this app is a must have. The app works great and is available for £3.99 in the iTunes store. You can download the WorldCard Mobile app from iTunes here. Go try it out and let know of your thoughts in the comments section.

Google gives users malware warnings

Yes you read right, Google is now giving users alerts if it believes that their system is infected with malware.

Over the last week, millions of users will have logged on to Google, only to find a warning telling them that Google believes that their computer ‘appears to be infected’.

Here is an image of that very message:


A Google warning telling users that their computer appears to be infected

Okay my PC isn't infected so I couldn't show you an actual message, but a clever bit of Photoshopping can help me to show you 😉

Google says that it is trying to improve the web for users, and in doing so, it believes that it can enhance users experience, and keep them safer online.

Malware can send users to ‘virus’ pages when they search Google, one of the main reasons why Google wants to help users fight it. The other is that often malware can send tonnes of spammy traffic towards Google. This is not very good for their servers, and could potentially become very costly.

Sometimes Google needs to turn some of its servers off for maintenance, meaning they need to redirect the traffic. However certain malware can keep ‘spamming’ these servers with unwanted traffic, causing the guys at Google a bit of a problem!

Google says that the main cause of malware infection is users downloading face anti-viruses when instructed to by bogus warnings on false websites.

The search giant does currently offer warnings to users on some websites that it knows could potentially infect their computer. Here is an example of the text it may put below a potentially dangerous search result:

This site may harm your computer

An example of the "This site may harm your computer." text that features below some search results in Google

Keeping safe online is a challenge, so it’s good to know that along with our anti-virus software, Google is also watching our back.

To find out more you can read the official blog post on Google’s blog 🙂

Search engines are changing the way our memory works

A recent article in Science Mag suggests that the use of computers and the internet might actually be changing the way our memory works.

A series of psychology experiments recently carried out have shown that sometimes, when people were presented with hard to answer questions, they began to think of computers.

If participants believed that it would be easy to find answers on Google later, then they had poorer recall of the actual answer, and yet a greater memory of where the answer was stored.

A head x-ray showing someone with a computer for a brainThe researchers said that the internet acts as a tool which we now depend upon to to aid our memories, by remembering some data for us.

Here is the abstract for the journal entry

The advent of the Internet, with sophisticated algorithmic search engines, has made accessing information as easy as lifting a finger. No longer do we have to make costly efforts to find the things we want. We can “Google” the old classmate, find articles online, or look up the actor who was on the tip of our tongue. The results of four studies suggest that when faced with difficult questions, people are primed to think about computers and that when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it. The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves.

In more simplified English, what this is basically saying is that it is now much easier to access data online, mainly thanks to search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. If we have a question, we can find the answer in seconds.


This has lead the the human brain associating the thought of a problem with computers, as it believes that the internet will be the source of the solution. Search engines are now embeded so much in our brain, that when we think of a problem, we no longer bother trying to work out the answer for ourselves, but instead we associate the possibility of finding the solution of the problem with a search engine.

Let’s be honest, who hasn’t been bugged by something, asked someone else who also wasn’t able to help and as a result was either told “Google it” or thought “I could Google that”? I have, in fact I would say it happens on a weekly basis!

Question time

So what do you think? Are computers, the internet and search engines making us stupid, or is it just that we are now adapting as a race to more efficient ways of finding out information?