Worldcard mobile iphone app review

Having been to a few shows and conferences recently, and acquiring a number of business cards that inevitably end up loose in my pocket, bag, or on my desk, I decided I’d better have a look for an iphone app that could read and OCR business cards and import the data into my contacts.

So, I downloaded and installed Worldcard mobile from the app store (£3.49), and tried it out.

worldcard mobile

It works pretty well, you fire it up and are presented with a screen where you can choose to photograph a business card, use an existing photo, or use copied text from an email signature (which is a nice addition). Using the taking a photo option then simply gives you a screen with some border edges to get the image straight, and you take the picture. You need fairly decent light for this, and if the business card is laminated, you’ll need to be careful to angle it so you don’t get any glare. If mistakes are made, you can easily correct them in the app itself.

With almost all business cards, it works superbly, reading the text accurately, and placing the data in the correct fields (mobile, email, name, etc). The only issues it seems to have is with particularly colourful and strangely designed business cards. Once you’ve pulled the data out, Worldcard mobile will export it into your contacts, or you can choose to update an existing contact.

Ultimately, a very useful app. The text recognition isn’t perfect, but is good enough in 90% of cases.

Orange vs. Vodafone in Nottingham

The data coverage and bandwidth in Nottingham on Orange has been dismal for quite some time. I actually spoke to them last week about this, and they said that they’re aware of issues in Nottingham, as there are too few 3G masts, and one of them is faulty. They were rather hoping that things would improve once they merged the T-Mobile network into theirs (apparently around the 6th October), though as far as I can tell, it hasn’t.

The photo below shows two speed tests, run on iphones, with the same app, at the same time. The one on the left is on Vodafone, and the one on the right is on orange. You can see the Vodafone download speed is around 3Mbits/sec, which is comparable to ADSL. The Orange speed, on the other hand, is 0.24Mbits/sec; this is around just 6 times faster than a standard dial-up connection.

Total Cost of Ownership – missing benefits?

Total cost of ownership (TCO) is a measure applied to (usually) IT hardware to determine its true cost, and apply that to the cost-benefit analysis. It’s typically used to explain why (for example) a 3-year life cycle for desktop PCs might actually work out a lot less costly than replacing them every 5 years, due to most of the costs being involved in the management and maintenance of the unit itself, rather than the acquisition costs.

The management and maintenance costs usually increase as the hardware ages, partly due to the failure rate, service and support, but also the “cost” of an employee using slow hardware, and the extra time it takes to carry out their work. This cost is really visible when a machine gets so old and slow that the user struggles to operate with it, or the device actually fails. By then, however, the true cost has already exceeded the cost of a new device acquisition, so you’d have been better off replacing it before that point.

What is often missed, however, are the benefits of the new system, as many such benefits are either difficult to measure in financial terms, or they’re simply unknown until the new system is implemented. Of course, if you operate in a very small enterprise, spending too much time calculating the TCO, and attempting to identify the financial benefits of replacement systems could take so long that your time begins to affect the TCO itself, and you’d be better off making very rough estimates. Luckily, it is generally accepted that a 3-4 year lifecycle for desktop machines is appropriate in most cases, and it’s pretty safe to follow that sort of timescale.

“Unlimited” data tariffs: What’s a true fair use limit?

Unlimited mobile data

I’m with Orange for my mobile contract, and data hiccups notwithstanding, quite satisfied. When I signed up, however, I asked for their “unlimited” data tariff, which (at the time) I was told had a 500MB “fair use” limit. 500MB? Really? If 500MB is fair use, then what’s standard usage? Do Orange expect people to use less than a couple hundred MB per month? I asked them what they could do to increase the limit, and was told I could bolt on another 500MB for an extra tenner, but I (rightly) guessed that probably wouldn’t be enough either.
As it turns out, they’re able to bolt on one of the low-end datastick tariffs, which turns out as £9 for 10GB per month. Since then, I’ve been merrily downloading and munching on data without any fear of incurring extra fees.
I don’t believe that I’m a particularly heavy user – I listen to podcasts, a little bit of internet radio, use twitter a lot, a bit of web, a bit of facebook, various web apps, and a little video too. Yet, I consistently go over 1GB per month, and sometimes 2GB. If I’m using this, there must be a considerable number of people using significantly more.
What sort of data volumes do you reach per month? And what do you think would be a true “fair use” limit?