Pick a Card--Anyone’s Card : New Newport Beach Company to Market User-Friendly Version of Electronic Rolodex
Inventions are born in the strangest places.
Avram Grossman conceived his brainchild while driving his car. He fumbled with a pile of business cards in his briefcase and spilled them all over the floor.
“I almost crashed my car,” he recalled. “I thought: ‘There’s got to be a way of keeping all these cards together electronically on a computer.’ ”
After seven years, that idea is finally ready to meet the world. Pacific Crest Technologies Inc., a new Newport Beach company, will introduce by the end of the month the product based on Grossman’s vision.
“We waited until technology caught up with the idea,” said Richard Sondheimer, president of Pacific Crest and co-founder along with Grossman. “Now it’s affordable.”
Pacific Crest’s CardGrabber, which will sell for about $350, scans the image of a business card into a computer in about eight seconds. It then alphabetizes the data in a kind of electronic Rolodex, sorts it by geographic location and can even scan handwritten notes on the backs of cards. It attaches to desktops or portable computers.
Pacific Crest’s card reader is not the first on the market. It will compete with similar devices by Torrance-based Microtek Lab Inc., a subsidiary of a Taiwan-based scanner maker Microtek International Inc.; and CypherTech Inc., formerly an engineering consulting firm in Sunnyvale. Both competitors are already shipping their card readers.
All three models can run under Microsoft Corp.’s popular Windows software, which employs graphics for simplification.
Microtek and CypherTech’s products are distinctly different, however, from Pacific Crest’s CardGrabber. Sondheimer said CardGrabber is easier to use because it does not require that the computer be reconfigured and, unlike the competitors’ machines, does not require installation of a custom circuit board for computers.
The stakes are high in the race for customers. Annual sales of card readers could reach 1 million units by 1998, according to a study by BIS Strategic Decisions, a market researcher in Norwell, Mass.
CypherTech gets credit for reaching the market first and winning good reviews in trade magazines such as PC Computing and PC Magazine. But Pacific Crest took its time with development to make sure it had the right product, co-founder Sondheimer said.
The winner can expect to grab a good chunk of the 1994 market, which is expected to hit 97,000 units and generate an estimated $27 million, according to the BIS study.
Business card readers have existed for several years in Japan, where they sell for more than $2,000 apiece. But in the United States, greater availability of hand-held scanners--which capture an image on paper and convert it to a computer image--and software for recognizing characters has opened new market opportunities.
“This application is going to bring the scanner into everybody’s awareness because it solves a basic problem,” said Susan Moyse, an analyst for BIS. “It’s a novelty that makes a perfect Christmas gift for corporate people.”
The card readers are being pitched to traveling salespeople, executives, accountants, lawyers and anyone else who doesn’t have the time to sort through piles of business cards stored in a briefcase or desk.
Avram, 42, is not a novice inventor. A perennial tinkerer, he built a mobile telephone when he was in high school.
In 1985, he founded a company called Universal Electronics that produced the first remote control unit that could switch channels on a television set as well as operate a stereo or videocassette recorder.
He left to become director of research for Toshiba America Information Systems in Irvine, but after three years there he tired of the corporate atmosphere and left to pursue development of the CardGrabber.
Big companies turned his idea down. He labored alone until he met Sondheimer, 34, a former financial consultant for Hollywood companies. The two incorporated their company in March, and found financing from private investors.
The firm, which moved from the founders’ homes to an office tower in Newport Beach in August, has eight employees now and is preparing to hire eight more. It teamed up with a Japanese company, Mitsumi Electronics Corp., to manufacture the scanner.
An immediate challenge for the company will be to bring down the price of the CardGrabber. While Microtek Labs is offering its Scan-in-Dex for a comparable $399, CypherTech has one software-only model that sells for $145 and a complete scanner and software package for $495.
“It’s a chicken-and-egg thing,” said Woody Hale, vice president of marketing for Microtek. “The volume has to go way up before the prices start coming down.”
All of the current models are only about 95% accurate when scanning text from the cards into the database. Each company promises that a majority of cards can be scanned accurately.
Hale said one problem is that printers have created such a dizzying array of type styles that the scanners can’t understand all of them. Mistakes have to be corrected by keyboard.
Using the machines, though, “is still faster than typing,” said Arnie Lapinig, executive vice president of CypherTech. “It takes about 40 minutes to type about 25 business cards. But if you scan the cards and correct any errors, it takes only about eight minutes.”
CompUSA, the largest computer super store chain, and Fry’s Electronics have agreed to sell the CardGrabber. Ingram Micro and Merisel Inc., the computer industry’s biggest distributors, have also agreed to carry the product.
