Business card scanning, defined

Every term you’ll meet when digitizing business cards — in plain English, two or three sentences each. Deeper how-tos live in the guides.

✦Business card scanner

An app that photographs a paper business card and converts the printed details into a structured digital contact — name, company, title, phone, email, address — instead of you typing them by hand.

✦OCR (Optical Character Recognition)

The classic technology for turning an image of text into machine-readable characters. Traditional OCR reads characters literally; it struggles with mixed scripts, name order and meaning — which is why modern scanners layer AI on top.

✦AI extraction

The successor to plain OCR: a large AI model reads the card image as a whole and returns structured fields — understanding that 山田 is a family name, that a string is a mobile number, and which language each part is written in.

✦Romanization

Writing a non-Latin script in Latin letters so it can be read, sorted and searched on any keyboard. Japanese kanji → rōmaji, Chinese characters → pinyin (or Cantonese romanizations like "Chan"), Korean hangul → Revised Romanization.

✦Meishi (名刺)

The Japanese business card, exchanged with two hands and treated with notable formality. Meishi routinely mix kanji, katakana, hiragana and Latin text, making them the classic hard case for scanners.

✦Míngpiàn (名片)

The Chinese business card, printed in Traditional characters (Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau) or Simplified characters (mainland China, Singapore). The script distinction matters and should be preserved when digitizing.

✦Myeongham (명⁠함)

The Korean business card, typically printed in hangul with the family name first, often alongside English. Romanization systems for Korean names vary, so a printed English name on the card is authoritative.

✦CJK

Shorthand for Chinese, Japanese and Korean scripts. CJK text has no spaces between words, can run vertically, and places family names first — all things a scanner built only for English gets wrong.

✦E.164

The international telephone number format: a plus sign, country code, then the number, e.g. +852 9123 4567 or +81 3-1234-5678. Numbers stored in E.164 dial correctly from any country and survive every import/export.

✦vCard (.vcf)

The universal contact-file standard. A .vcf file carries a person’s full details (including photo) and opens directly into the contacts app on iPhone, Android and desktop — the format behind every “Save contact” button.

✦CSV export

Comma-separated values — the spreadsheet-friendly export format. A well-formed business-card CSV has one column per field (family name, given name, company, phone by type…) so it opens cleanly in Excel or Google Sheets and imports into CRMs.

✦Mojibake (文字化け)

Garbled text produced when bytes written in one character encoding are read back in another — 山田太郎 arriving as 山田太郎. The Japanese term literally means "character transformation". The characters are usually intact and recoverable; only the interpretation is wrong.

✦UTF-8 BOM

A three-byte marker (EF BB BF) at the start of a file that identifies it as UTF-8. Excel on Windows decodes a double-clicked .csv with the system code page unless this marker is present, which is why CJK names so often appear garbled in spreadsheets — and why a well-behaved export writes one.

✦Legacy CJK encodings

The pre-Unicode character sets still met in exports and older systems: Shift_JIS (Japanese), GBK/GB18030 (Simplified Chinese), Big5 (Traditional Chinese) and EUC-KR (Korean). Converting text through the wrong one is the usual source of mojibake or irreversible question marks.

✦Kabushiki gaisha (株式会社)

The Japanese joint-stock company form, the rough equivalent of "Inc." or "Ltd." It appears either before the company name (前株) or after it (後株), and is part of the legal name rather than decoration — so a scanner should preserve it.

✦Digital business card

Your contact details as a shareable web page, reached by QR code or link, with a one-tap vCard download. The receiver needs no app — which is why digital cards work where networking apps never did.

✦QR code sharing

Encoding your digital card’s URL in a QR code so any phone camera can open it instantly. The QR code is the doorway; the card page is what it opens.

✦Confidence score

A 0–100% self-assessment some AI extraction systems attach to a scanned card, indicating how certain the model is about what it read. It is a signal about the model’s own certainty, not a guarantee of accuracy — the surest check is still comparing the extracted fields against the card image itself.

✦Deduplication

The general practice of identifying records that describe the same person — matching on email, or on the same romanized name at the same company — so that repeated entries can be collapsed into one. A common step in any contact-database cleanup.

✦Perspective correction (deskew)

Straightening a card photographed at an angle back into a clean rectangle before extraction. Together with auto-cropping, it lets you photograph a table full of cards casually and still get accurate reads.

✦PWA (Progressive Web App)

A web app that installs to your home screen and works offline like a native app — no app store required. BizCardPro.AI ships as a PWA, queueing offline scans until you reconnect.

✦Data controller

Under the GDPR, whoever decides why and how personal data is processed. Scan a business card into your own contact list and you are the controller of that data — not the app you used. This is the point most guidance on card scanning gets wrong.

✦Data processor

A party that processes personal data on the controller’s instructions rather than for its own purposes — the role a scanning app plays when it extracts a card on your behalf. Processors act under contract; they do not decide what the data is used for.

✦Legitimate interests

One of the GDPR’s six lawful bases (Article 6(1)(f)), and the one normally relied on for ordinary B2B follow-up after a card is exchanged. It requires a balancing test against the cardholder’s rights, and it never overrides an objection to direct marketing.