‘WorldCard HD’ – Manage your Contacts the Smart Way

Are you a business-oriented person? Then you would probably be meeting many people every day. It really gets difficult for you to manage all the business cards that pile up on your table and in your wallet. Here comes an app that helps you manage your cards. Yes, ‘WorldCard HD’ is an iPad app which is an intelligent business card manager.

This iPad application is the handiest tool for your business. With ‘WorldCard HD’, you can save contact information of multilingual business cards. This is an app that transfers your business card details to your iPad without manual typing, but by scanning them using the iPad’s camera. One of the notable features of ‘WorldCard HD’ is that it uses OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology to recognize the details. Once you capture the image, you just have to click on the recognize button.

Once you open the app, you see 3 icons, namely Contacts, Favorites and Maps. The home screen displays names in alphabetical order. Under the contacts option, you have several choices. Using them you can add a new contact by capturing the business card details through your iPad’s camera. The app automatically recognizes the name, company information, address, phone number etc. You can also add contacts from your album by enabling the ‘WorldCard HD’ local services in the system settings and can also import contacts from the iPad. You can check the contact details and edit them if required with the edit icon. You can export your contacts to cloud, email etc., with the contact management icon. The Favorites icon allows you to select contacts and add them to your favorites. With the Maps option you can select a contact and find out where he is located. It also gives you the GPS information of the contact.

WorldCard HD appThe Settings option helps you customize your preferences. It has 3 main options namely, Display, General and Cloud and About. With the display option, ‘WorldCard HD’ allows you to set the display sequence of the first name and last name and the indexing criteria can be set as contact name or company name. With the general option, you can set the index to follow any of the orders like English alphabet, Chinese Stroke, Japanese Phonetics etc. The cloud allows you to share or backup your contacts via cloud services (iCloud/Dropbox) option. The help option of the app gives a clear overview of the various functionalities of the app.

‘WorldCard HD’ is available in languages like English, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish. It is a business app costing $14.99 that requires iOS 4.2 or later versions. The best part of the app is that you can scan multiple cards at the same time. You can also contact your friends through email, Facebook, Twitter etc. Except for the price, the app seems to be the ultimate choice for any business person. With ‘WorldCard HD‘ in your iPad, dealing with business contacts will definitely become easier.

Data Storage Problems

This week the New York Times published a long article about the problem of data storage, and I would like to summarize some of their findings. The article is available here in Saturday’s technology section.

The article is an attack at what the author sees as wasteful use of resources in data storage centres. There are now hundreds of thousands of these huge centres spread throughout the world, and the problem is they use an incredible amount of electricity. The servers have to be kept cool and they have to have spare capacity so that we can download whatever we want whenever we want.

Inside a US data centre

Inside a US data centre

Worldwide these centres use about 30 billion watts of electricity, and that is about 30 nuclear power plants worth of power. A single data center uses about the same amount as a small town, and the main criticism is the nature of the usage.

In the US 2% of all electricity used goes to these data centers, but the vast majority of this resource is wasted. Typically many servers are left to run 24 a day but never or rarely used (more than half in this study), and the average machine in operation uses less than 10% of its capacity. Servers are left running obsolete programs or in ‘comatose’ because nobody wants to risk a mistake and turn them off.

All of this means that any data center might use 30 times as much electricity as is needed to carry out the functions it performs.

All of these centres also have to have a back up in case of power failure, and so are surrounded by diesel generators and stacks of batteries, and many have been found in breach of environmental regulations and fined. The article gives details but the companies are names that we all know and use.

If you read the more than 300 comments however you will discover that a lot of people do not agree with the findings as reported. Many technicians argue that the companies cited are investing huge amounts of money into making the storage of data more efficient, and are constructing wind farms and using solar power in an attempt to cut costs and emissions. The article has its agenda and exploits it fully, but the problem is real.

I personally believe that we are witnessing the results of a digital culture change. We no longer have to store data on our machines, we can store it in some mythical cloud out there in the cyber-universe. This makes us think that it somehow exists without the need for a hard drive, but this is not true. As a result we keep things that we do not need. I have 500 e mails in my inbox, with attachments, photos that I will never again look at and other useless things, and they are all in storage somewhere.

Technology advances, storage gets cheaper and uses less space, but the amount of data created is growing at an incredible rate. My question is, can we do anything about it? Are we not the ones who should take some responsibility and think about the consequences of our actions. We think about not using paper to print emails but we don’t think about not sending them!

The journey of an email – as told by Google

Today, when I opened up Google, I saw something new. In the past Google has used the space directly below the search box to notify users of holiday events, privacy policy updates, tributes to industry legends – such as the Steve Jobs tribute, among other things.

Google's Tribute to Steve Jobs

Google's tribute to industry legend - Steve Jobs

Today however Google is using this spot to advertise its new feature, which lets you follow the journey of an email: ‘The Story of Send’.

Google's homepage with a link to 'The Story of Send'

Google advertises 'The Story of Send: Follow an email on its journey.' on its homepage

When you click the link, you are taken to a page on Google’s Green website (.google.com/green) which tells you how you can

“Take a journey through Google’s data centers by following an email along its path.”

Click ‘Start the story’ and the journey begins! Google takes you through an interactive journey of a Gmail email, from when you hit send on your device, to when it arrives at its destination.

The tour takes about 5 minutes (around 50 if you watch all the videos) however, as we all know, the journey of a real email, takes seconds – if that sometimes.

It is evident that the project is meant to be promotional for Google, as it points out all the good points along the journey. For example, how they have ‘built an extensive Internet backbone across the U.S.‘ to speed things up; how they ‘protect your message with a wide range of security measures‘ and how their data centres use ‘50% less energy than typical data centers‘ etc.

What the journey fails to point out is the less desirable things that go on. One example being how your email is read (or spidered) by Google Bots/Spiders, keywords are picked out, and then relevant ads are displayed alongside the message. Another being how Google want not only to own the systems which deliver your emails, but also the infrastructure (the cables and power) which gets it there – is that not a bit of a monopoly?

I like Google, I think it does a wonderful job, and it is great that it offers us all so much for free, however they do also do a good job of covering up the stuff they don’t want us to here.

Check out the video below for more. I found it and tweeted about it a while ago, however never really found an article for it to go in.

So, have you taken the journey yet? Aside from the obvious PR (public relations not PageRank) stuffed in, it does make interesting viewing.

More interested in talking about the ethics of Google? Add your view below 🙂

Why not talk about them both!

Your views?