The Hungarian Optical Character Recognition software developer, Recognita Corp, has come out with a software package capable of reading and storing away information from business cards. Running under Windows, Recognita Card is based on technology already used in the firm’s Recognita 2.0 OCR package which shipped 30,000 copies (including upgrades) since its launch at CeBit last year, but it has the added features of being able automatically to separate text and graphics, rotate text, and read greyscale and inverse text in order to tackle the calling cards of the more creative. A key element in the package is a knowledge database designed to enable the software to identify names, addresses, job titles for what they are, all automatically, and then place them into the appropriate field in each record. Any spurious text is put into a ‘note field’ and can be dragged and dropped into the right spot using a mouse by the operator. The information from business cards can then be sorted, selected and used to print labels or put together batch faxes and can also be exported to word-processing or contract management software. The scanned-in image of each card is retained for reference. The company argues that while there a few products already on the market capable of tackling American business cards, their European counterparts tend to be less structured, more flamboyant, and the text harder to classify. Recognita Corp, which used to be called ‘SzKI Recognita Corp’ after the former state-owned software monopoly, which sold its minority stake in the company last year, also demonstrated new versions of its mainstream products Recognita Plus and Recognita Select. These have been updated to incorporate Hewlett-Packard’s latest Accupage technology, and the range of scanners supported by the latter package has been increased. Recognita Corp already has 40 distributors across the world for these products as well as subsidiaries in the US and Germany, but sales and marketing director, Akos Bernath says he is still looking for resellers in the Far East and perhaps an additional distributor in Belgium. Recognita Corp is launching development toolkits for OS/2.1, Santa Cruz Unix, Windows and CTOS so systems integrators can incorporate its OCR technology into their own applications.