‘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.

Google and Microsoft take on the cloud

Over the past few years cloud computing has become an increasingly popular trend. Two of the biggest tech names are also big names in the cloud computing industry: Google and Microsoft. But while both Google and Microsoft may have well-known cloud platforms, they are each extremely different and have met varied levels of success.

Google first launched its cloud computing platform, Google Apps, in 2006. Currently, Google Apps is available in four different platforms – Business, Education, Government, and Non-Profit – as well as a free version for personal use that can be obtained by creating a Google account. Google Apps is a completely cloud-based solution that does not require any additional hardware or software. The suite lives entirely within the web browser making it accessible from anywhere on any web-enabled device.

Microsoft introduced Office 365, its cloud solution, in summer 2011. When it first hit the market, Office 365 was available only for businesses. However, in spring 2012, Microsoft added a new platform for educational institutions. Office 365 is a hybrid cloud solution that requires some additional servers and software. This means that Microsoft users will have some patching and licensing and it also limits the mobility that Microsoft users can enjoy, especially in comparison to Google users.

Office 365 LogoAside from the difference in user experience and number of platforms, there is also a major price difference between the Google and Microsoft cloud services. Google Apps is a less expensive cloud service than Office 365. The highest-priced platform of Google Apps is the business suite, which runs standard for $50 per user per year. This price includes the entire apps suite and is standard for businesses of all sizes. The least expensive platform of Office 365 costs $48/user/year, but it is only available for businesses with fewer than 50 employees and does not include the entire apps suite. This means that businesses running on this platform must purchase add-ons, which will significantly increase the cost of the service. All other Office 365 platforms are priced higher, except for Office 365 for Education which, like Google Apps for Education, is free.

While the differences between Google and Microsoft might seem quite large now, they were even more distinct a few months ago. Recently, in an effort to better compete with Google, Microsoft added the new Office 365 for Education platform and cut its prices by as much as 20%. While these changes did narrow the gap somewhat, they still leave Office 365 trailing behind Google Apps in terms of platform diversity and pricing.

In May, Gartner Inc., a research firm, reported that businesses looking to move to the cloud for the first time were choosing a Google Apps migration one-third to one-half of the time. Perhaps this high percentage is a result of the differences between Google Apps and Office 365. This report came after a 2009 study by the same firm that predicted that Microsoft would be outselling Google by 4-to-1 in 2012.

In addition to making changes to bring in new users, Microsoft’s efforts are also targeted at keeping existing customers with Microsoft. To better achieve this goal Microsoft also created a “Google Compete” team, dedicated entirely to retaining current Microsoft users. The Wall Street Journal reported on this team’s failed attempt to keep Dominion Enterprises, a Virginia company, a Microsoft customer. Dominion Enterprises CIO Joe Fuller chose to have Google Apps setup even after the “Google Compete” team tried to convince him otherwise. The team invited Fuller to the Microsoft headquarters where he received a tour and saw the research lab, roadmaps to current technologies, and inside looks into new technologies. Nevertheless, Fuller still made the decision to switch to Google Apps. According to the Wall Street Journal, Fuller said he made the decision because he felt Google Apps was the “cooler” product and because he would pay $200,000/year for Google instead of $2 million for Microsoft, resulting in a savings of about 50%.

Although both Google Apps and Office 365 are well-known cloud services, there are very big distinctions that separate the two. Everything from user experience, platform variety, and price are different. Because of these differences, Microsoft has found itself trying to play catch-up in order to truly compete with Google Apps in the cloud.

Cloud reality check infographic

Below is a really interesting infographic I want to share with you. It is a survey done by Rackspace who have found that server management seems to be a lot more costly than many businesses think.

Some of the figures are astonishing! In 2012, 59% of people bought the wrong amount of servers in the UK. This is even worse at a staggering 67% of people in the US. Think of all that time wasted, because there aren’t the right number of servers in place. Too many can be a financial burden, whilst too few can mean that people aren’t able to access the resources they need, when they need to.

More and more firms appear to be choosing to outsource their cloud needs to bigger, more capable firms, however there are still many which choose to host their own servers.

One of the most saddening (for me anyway) statistics of the whole infographic is that 90% of UK firms don’t thin their approach to new technologies is cutting edge.

Scroll down to see the full infographic!

The reality of cloud computing infographic by Rackspace UK.

What is your opinion on infographics, do you like them? I do, and am wondering whether we should publish them more often. Your thoughts?