Introduction

In this era of knowledge management, applying technological products to improve efficiency and productivity is important. Time must be well spent, not wasted on routine chores like business card management.  Leave those tasks to technology.

Penpower Technology Ltd. develops Business Character Recognition (BCR) technology that helps users who exchange business cards to manage business card information efficiently. Users can scan or digitize a snapshot of the business card into the computer. Penpower WorldCard management software will automatically recognize the company name, person name, address, mobile phone number, email address and other information on the business card and sort it onto their respective fields.

Designed in accordance with user behavior, WordCard management software allows users to synchronize recognized business card information with third party applications such as Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express, IBM Lotus Notes, ACT! By Sage, FrontRange Solutions Goldmine, Salesforce, and Windows Mobile, saving time to keep contact information in sync. It also supports various mobile platforms, e.g. WinCE, Palm, Pocket PC, and Windows Mobile, with Symbian to come.

The deep integration of Penpower BCR technology with third-party applications makes it very easy for enterprise users to manage their contact databases.  Users can still use their current applications without any changes while they use Penpower WorldCard products as the front end to transfer contact info automatically and efficiently from physical business cards into their applications. WorldCard products streamline the whole process. With the emerging popularity of personal mobile 3C products, Penpower has applied its business card recognition technology to mobile phones and successfully developed a WorldCard business card recognition system for Windows Mobile platform, which has been licensed to major Windows Mobile phone manufacturers.

In addition, Penpower has been developing an Identity Card Recognition System which can read and recognize identity cards with 0.1 cm thickness. It offers a solution for automatic ID card verification in the processing of new account applications commonly required in financial and telecommunication sectors (in current case, verifications on identity cards and health cards). The solution not only scans and recognizes identity cards but also saves them as image files. It recognizes information such as name, date of birth, ID card number, address and so on with 97% accuracy, not only saving time but also serving as the best recognition-based solution for the applications of digitized operations in the future. This system comes with one USB A6-size color scanner with resolution of 600 dpi, weighting only 216g. Its light weight makes it very suitable for salespeople on the move. Every image only takes up 70-80k of memory space and saves a lot of hard disk memory space.