Four New Must Have iPhone Apps for Business

Posted byDaniel HoangPosted inThoughts

Early, I posted 10 essential business apps for a traveling consultant. Since then, I’ve gotten my hands on several new apps that have enhanced my productivity while mobile.

CardSnap Business Card Scanner ($14.99)
Most of the business card readers on the app store do the OCR (optical character recognition) using the phone’s relatively slow processor. For something as intense as reading and interpreting text from a business card to the iPhone’s contacts, the hardware just isn’t equipped to handle that. To use CardSnap, you take a picture of the business card (must have 3GS or phone with focusing case) and upload it to CardSnap’s servers. Their servers do the work and humans validate the data when the system doesn’t work. Think Amazon’s mechanical turk. I found the accuracy to be acceptable, however, requiring me to manually intervene on some cards.

DropBox (Free)
While many online data storage and syncing systems are available, DropBox continues to be my go to service for its ease of use. I have the software installed on my different laptops which syncs my files to the cloud. Using the iPhone app, I can pull up the files and review them just before a meeting. This is especially useful on a short haul flight where I don’t want to pull out the laptop and only want to do a practice run prior to the presentation. DropBox works with most file types and can open almost anything on the iPhone.

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Creative Commons License photo credit: Chris Blakeley

Travel Tracker Pro ($8.99)
This is the all in one tool, better known for their Palm app, but been available for the iPhone. A bit “expensive” but my go to travel tool. It integrates with tripit.com to keep me updated on my flights, flight status, and tracking expenses. There’s a lot of other functionality that I haven’t had a chance to use yet, such as travel lists. I just created a pre-flight packing check list for things like toiletries, ticket, clothes, laptop, etc.

WordPress 2 (Free)
Most of my blogs are on the WordPress platform and this free app allows me to write/update posts, but more importantly, respond to comments. While it’s possible to update a blog (I do for my cat at mochicutie.com), it’s not very practical to write full posts while mobile. Instead, it’s very useful to read new comments and respond back.

GPS
There’s no recommendation here because I have yet to find anything that works better than the standard Google Maps. Hoping and waiting for Apple to approve the Google Navigation app.

Published by Daniel Hoang

Daniel Hoang is a visual leader, storyteller, and creative thinker. As an experienced management consultant, he believes in a big picture approach that includes strong project leadership, creative methods, change management, and strategic visioning. He uses a range of visual tools to communicate business challenges, solutions, and goals. His change strategy is to build "tribes" of supporters and evangelists to drive change in culture and organization. Daniel is an avid technologist and futurist and early adopter.

2 thoughts on “Four New Must Have iPhone Apps for Business”

  1. Business card scanning applications seem to be blooming on the iPhone since October … CardSnap is one of several applications taking the approach of uploading images to a server, so they only need the phone's camera to be good enough – another similar application I really like in ScanR. However, scanning ON the iPhone itself does work, without sending anything over the network – as well and faster than uploading to any server. I am a biased observer since I have had the pleasure of developing and launching just such an app, http://www.scanbizcards.com … don't take my word for it, just take the free version of the app for a "test scan" … and if you find an image where CardSnap does significantly better, email it to me and you've earned a promo code to get the full app for free 🙂

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