Version 3.09 was posted last night (Thursday Oct 13)!

The highlights of this update are:

• NEW: manual transcription option!
• Survey! Share your opinion about ScanBizCards and get a chance to earn a $300 Apple gift certificate.
• Better ordering of scan results
• NEW: share button to invite friends on Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn/email (and make money in the process!)
• Explicit export to Daylite
• Several Salesforce fixes + new option to export as a contact
• Reminder: Jigsaw export available for Beta testing.

iOS5 notice: before we go into details a quick heads up – we are being told that our feature to create a contact from the clipboard is not working on iOS5. We are looking into it and will fix this in an update soon.

What’s New

Manual Transcriptions!
This one is exciting. Say you just scanned a card and got disappointing results. Yes, I know what you are thinking – never happens with ScanBizCards! We wish, and we are working on it, meanwhile, yes, it does happen (just don’t tell anyone). We are now launching a brand new service which will let you simply touch a button to request that someone in our transcription team go over that card and manually fix what needs to be fixed! Cards pending review are marked in red then as soon as results are in you will see a message in the app and transcribed cards will turn green. All pending and transcribed cards will also appear in a special folder. Because this is brand new we don’t quite know yet how quickly we will be able to review cards but we are hoping to keep it under 30 minutes, and pricing that service is also not set in stone until we measure how long it takes to rectify cards. The idea is really to offer the best of both worlds: instant OCR results + option to go manual if we missed too many items – and in any case have all extended features of the app available regardless.
Note: at this time it requires an active Web Sync subscription. Please email info@scanbizcards.com if you’d like to join the private Beta of this service.

ScanBizCards Survey
Ready to tell us what you think about ScanBizCards? We’d love to hear your thoughts and have prepared a survey. This survey should take you no more than 15 minutes to complete and if you complete the survey by the closing date (October 24), we will enter you into a sweepstakes to win a $300 Apple gift card. Here is the link to the survey:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/scanbizcards

Better ordering of scan results
Long overdue. Until now we showed scan results in the order found on the card (top down and left to right). This is really helpful to the ScanBizCards team, to easily associate a text result with a pattern on the card, less useful to our customers who care about the person’s name, title, company etc regardless of where that information was found on the card! Apparently we realized only now that there are more customers of the app than ScanBizCards team members so with this update all cards will display scan results in the same consistent order: name, job title(s), company, phone(s), email(s), URL(s) and address(es). Note that online (Web Sync) we always displayed contact info in that order so now the app is doing the same.

Sharing
We added a new button right on the main page at the bottom to share a recommendation for ScanBizCards with your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn networks or just via email. It offers your friend a link to install the Lite app with another link which then upgrades the Lite app to premium features for 2 weeks. No less importantly, we keep track of these invites and each time one of your friends – even one year later – decides to buy the app, we PayPal you $1! You can be on your way to untold riches, don’t wait .
Note: you can track the status of invites and conversions at http://www.scanbizcards.com/tellafriend.php?email=your-email-address (where your-email-address is the email address you provided when sharing from the app). That page also includes a checkbox to request 1 month free Web Sync instead of the $1 PayPal payment each time.

Explicit export to Daylite CRM
Daylite CRM recently added an option to import from ScanBizCards on their new contact page. This update adds an option to initiate this exporting into Daylite from within ScanBizCards. You’ll find the Daylite option right next to the Salesforce export on the export menu. Note: this means you can now export to Daylite any previously scanned card or contacts you capture from text copied to the clipboard.

Salesforce fixes and features
This update fixes several issues with Saleforce accounts where certain standard fields are excluded from the Lead Layout (e.g. Fax and Mobile). The app now download the full list of both standard and custom fields and lets you control which fields you wants to prompted for. We also added a new setting to export to Salesforce as new contacts (rather than new leads).

Jigsaw
ScanBizCards added a feature to export to Jigsaw i V3.08. Jigsaw is a service that enables you to get up to date direct contact info for a great many professional contacts in the Jigsaw database (27m contacts). The way it works is that you earn points for contributing a contact which you can then use to retrieve another contact. I personally use the service and love it.

Note: Jigsaw accepts contacts only in some countries and the app will tell you when you try to export a contact in a country where Jigsaw doesn’t operate. Note also that currently the app doesn’t allow getting credit for updating contacts already in the Jigsaw database, for this you would have to do it on the Jigsaw web site. To be addressed soon. Sign-up at www.jigsaw.com.

IMPORTANT: the Jigsaw feature is in private Beta, to enable please do this:

• touch Settings on the main screen
• type this into the Configuration field: var:enablejigsaw=1

By all means do tell us what you think about this feature!

Contacts2Excel
Not that new actually, it was released in April. This is just a little app to select a subset of your address book in a flexible way, select which property you care about, their order and how you want to call them – then export into an Excel CSV file. Useful to export contacts into other apps such as CRM apps or email marketing, to share contacts with others or simply to make periodicals backups of your address book. Try it here . We swear it distracted us from ScanBizCards only for a few days!

Tips of the Month

Tip #1: finding light in dark places. Ever wanted to scan a card in a dimly lit place? Using the flash is not an option as it creates overexposure where it hits the card but there is a solution! Borrow someone’s cell phone or tablet , run an app on it with a light background (such as the iPhone mail app). Hold that other phone face down to shine light on the card and voila, should be a great scan! You can use the same trick with your own laptop, placing the card on the keyboard and half closing the lid to shine light on the card.

Tip #2: starting with this version we start processing cards as soon as you take a photo. This means that you should consider cropping cards before scanning – if nothing else for aesthetic reasons – because we are putting the time you spend doing that to good use!

Rate this Version

You know what to do! Your continued support helps us break the record of being the “idiots” who spent the longest time enhancing a single iPhone app . Apple saves your last review so it only takes a minute to update a previous review for the current version: tap Help on the start page then “Rate This Version”.