Organizing business cards is one of the common dilemmas of business persons. You can hire a third-party processor to outsource card scanning and ask them to generate a contact list for your phone. Now we have an alternative approach to remove the routine task.
Social Groupware[J], a subsidiary of web community consultancy GaiaX[J], has released Lister[J], the iPhone app that automatically collects contact information from signatures of the e-mails you’ve received and adds them to your contact list. By setting your e-mail account and password on the app, the Lister server fetches e-mails using the IMAP protocol, detects e-mail signatures in them and generates (or updates) a contact list for you. You are allowed to retrive a contact from your list on the server in order to e-mail or call someone with the iPhone.
Lister launched last October, but it was forced to interrupt the operation because of heavy load of the signature detecting server. They improved the performance of signature detecting and resumed the service this week. The server has a function to learn which every part of the e-mail body is name, postal address, e-mail address and phone number to avoid future misreading and improve the performance to detect.
The company plans to introduce an Android App for the service in the near future.
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[Update] February 2nd, 2011
The Android app for Lister was just released.
http://market.android.com/search?q=pname:jp.co.s_gw.android.lister
Masaru IKEDA