Lubetkin.net

CompuSchmooze™ Newspaper Columns: A Monthly Guide to Jewish Resources in Cyberspace


posted by Steve Lubetkin  # 10:35 AM 0 Comments
CompuSchmooze

The CompuSchmoozeTM name is a trademark owned bySteven L. Lubetkin, and is the name of a series of columns published monthly in the Jewish Community Voice of Southern New Jersey. These articles and associated podcasts are Copyright © 1996-2010 Steven L. Lubetkin. All rights reserved.

Read the current CompuSchmooze column here.


Any commercial use of these articles or podcasts requires purchase of use rights from the copyright owner. For information on reprint rights to these articles, please send me an email message.

Sunday, February 27, 2005

 

CompuSchmooze® February 2005 – Easier Way to Track Business Cards from CardScan

CompuSchmooze® February 2005 – Easier Way to Track Business Cards from CardScan
Copyright © 2005 Steven L. Lubetkin. All rights reserved.
By Steven L. Lubetkin




CompuSchmooze Podcast #2, 3-21-2005, Interview with Dexter Sealy, Chief Technology Officer, CardScan Inc.




Now that I’ve taken started my own public relations consulting practice (see the January 5 Voice), I spend a lot of time networking with prospective clients at luncheons, conferences and meetings.
When I come home from these meetings, I empty my pockets of stacks of business cards collected from these prospects. There was a time when it was a truly tedious task to manually enter the data into a contact management system like Microsoft Outlook.

Then, a few years ago, a company then called Corex -- they've since changed their name to CardScan-- (http://www.cardscan.com) introduced a single-purpose scanner/software combination called CardScan to scan and convert business cards into useful data.

In its earlier days, CardScan was a mixed blessing. The software couldn’t always read fancy typefaces or graphic designs. Users said they spent more time correcting entries than if they just keyed in the card information themselves. Sometimes, though, the technology industry actually does make dramatic improvements.

The newest versions of CardScan’s software can read a wide range of business cards and even correctly interpret words written in white on dark backgrounds (“reversed” text, to graphic designers).

To me, CardScan’s biggest negative factor has always seemed to be price.

The company, which has now changed its name to CardScan Inc., sells a version of CardScan for offices that allows five people to share one of its high-end scanners, the CardScan Executive, and five software licenses, for $449.99. The CardScan Executive standalone system, which includes a color scanner, is $249.99, but there is a rebate through February 5 that brings the price down to $219.99.

Happily, they’ve also introduced a CardScan Personal edition. This version has a no-frills black-and-white scanner, with a suggested retail of $149.99, but which periodically goes on sale at local office supply stores for around $125.

CardScan’s high end Executive product can link directly to all the popular contact management programs like Microsoft Outlook, ACT!, Lotus Notes, GoldMine, smartphones, PocketPCs, and Palm PDAs. The CardScan Personal program integrates with Outlook, Palms, and PocketPCs.

CardScan scanners attach to a USB port on your PC. You insert business cards one at a time in the scanner, and the system scans and recognize cards one-at-a-time or in batches. You can also add information to the records in a batch with a single command, such as assigning them all to the same category, or adding a common note to the Notes field in each record.

The software is very intelligent. It can figure out from the card’s design and surrounding text which phone number should go in the “Fax” field in the CardScan database. Likewise, it automatically populates email, web address, and all the other fields.

After the program has scanned and converted a batch of cards to data, you can page through the records and compare the data to images of the cards that you can magnify and pan around on the screen.

My experience is that CardScan Personal can recognize successfully about 90-95 percent of the text on most cards you give it.

Once you configure CardScan to work with your favorite contact manager, an icon for that program appears on the toolbar. Select the records you want to transfer by highlighting them, and click the transfer icon. The cards automatically get populated into your contact manager software. If you don’t have a contact management program like Outlook, CardScan can actually work quite nicely for that purpose, and will even integrate its address book with your email program.

Unless you need to integrate with something other than a Palm or Outlook, or absolutely must have color scans of the business cards you collect, you should be fine with CardScan Personal. The main thing (for us consultants, anyway) is to convert those piles of business cards into useful prospecting information.

# # # #

 

CompuSchmooze - January 2005: Yad Vashem Database of Holocaust Victims Now Online


CompuSchmooze - January 2005: Yad Vashem Database of Holocaust Victims Now Online
By Steven L. Lubetkin
Copyright © 2005 Steven L. Lubetkin. All rights reserved.
WORD COUNT: 658


Yad Vashem, also known as The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority, has created a Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names that you can search from the Yad Vashem website.

And it’s clearly long overdue.

On December 22, Yad Vashem announced that it had received more than 3 million website visitors in the month since the database was made available. Before the database was made available, Yad Vashem’s website generally averaged between 140,000-150,000 visitors per month, according to a press release.

“These numbers illustrate the place of the Shoah in the public consciousness, and the desire of people to remember it and know more about its victims,” said Avner Shalev, chairman of the Yad Vashem Directorate. “I hope and believe that people will use this unique tool to submit Pages of Testimony for victims whose names are not yet recorded,” he added.

Before November 2004, anyone interested in researching Pages of Testimony submitted to Yad Vashem had to visit the museum and memorial to victims of the Holocaust to review them. Now, you can search the information directly.

According to Yad Vashem, visitors to the Names' Database can search for nearly three million names of Shoah victims recorded to date. Users can also submit (electronic Pages of Testimony – special forms containing biographical details of individual victims – for those victims as yet unrecorded.

The database also provides educational context around victims of the Holocaust through a “Stories Behind the Names” feature, which uses Pages of Testimony as the starting point for a personalized educational session, according to Yad Vashem.

“Through links on the Pages themselves, the victim’s life is put into context, through additional historical, geographical, and linguistic information. So, for example, if a victim was a doctor from Lodz wwas murdered in Chelmno, the user may learn more about professions common among Jews in the 1930s, the town of Lodz, or the death camp at Chelmno by simply clicking on the relevant part of the Page,” the site says.

The bulk of the database’s information comes from some two million Pages of Testimony submitted to Yad Vashem over the past 50 years, nearly all of which have now been digitized, the site reports.

Earlier this summer, during the 2004 International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (IAJGS) conference in Jerusalem, Yad Vashem allowed the genealogists attending the conference to test the database. The memorial’s Yad Vashem Magazine reported on the genealogy conference.

Users can view and print Pages of Testimony, or a screen containing a victim’s personal story, based on information from archival sources available in the Database.

A search in the Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names for “Lubetkin” received 29 resulting records. I recognized several Pages of Testimony submitted by my British cousins, whose father, Berthold Lubetkin, had been a noted architect. But there are also several for victims from branches of my family that are unfamiliar. These will bear further investigation.

Each record includes transcriptions of the data fields from the original paper Pages of Testimony document, and a digital image of the original, but on the evening when I was visiting the site, I had trouble getting the digital images to display in a full page size that could be easily examined, although I could print them at full size.

Also accessible on the Yad Vashem website are the International School for Holocaust Studies; online exhibitions including Holocaust era artwork, and photographs from the Warsaw Ghetto; the Righteous Among the Nations and a download page offering Acrobat PDF versions of the Pages of Testimony form, a Survivors’ Registration Form; and files that contain lists of Shoah victims’ names formatted for use in Name Remembrance Ceremonies.

There is also a Yad Vashem online store, where the only merchandise available for purchase is books and research studies on the Holocaust, anti-Semitism and pre-Holocaust Europe. You can also make donations online to support Yad Vashem or the Central Database.


# # # #


 

CompuSchmooze Columns

I originally intended to post hyperlinks from my CompuSchmooze column in a blog associated with my web hosting company, but Blogger.com seems to be far more robust, so we will post them here.

Each month, my column looks at another aspect of technology, often with a Jewish perspective. Now, I'm adding blogging and podcasting to the column, and I hope you will join me in a conversation about technology, Judaism, and where they connect!



 

Home | About Us | ©2009 Lubetkin & Co. Communications, LLC. All rights reserved.