The AppsLab

Oracle Social Network Business Cards

By Noel Portugal • October 15th, 2012 • 4 Comments

Since the Oracle Social Network Developer Challenge I have been pretty pumped about the integration possibilities. After every conference I found myself with a bunch of business cards and no time to formally collect data. Recently I found CardMunch from Linkedin, an app that allows you to snap a picture of the business card and “automagically” get the persons data ready to add to LinkedIn. Great app.

I went to search for an available API out there and I found a great one from FullContact called CardShark. The main difference between CardMunch and CarShark is that CardMunch uses Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and CardShark uses OCR software.

Editorial update: CardShark also uses Amazon MT, as found out in the comments.

So naturally I created my own version of CardMunch for the Oracle Social Network but even easier. Just Text a picture of the business card.

1. Take a picture of the business card and Text it to [Short message] along with the word “contact”.
   (The first time you text you will receive a message asking to accept with “Y”).

That’s it. When the information has been proceed by FullContact’s Cardshark OCR process it is posted to the Oracle Social Network and it will notify the sender by text. The scanning process may take a few minutes, so don’t try to wait for long. Just snap a picture of the card and wait.

The information is posted to an Oracle Social Network public Social Object called Company. The webhookurl endpoint that Cardshark calls makes sure that the Company doesn’t already exists and if it does it just adds the user to the existing Company.

The MMS capability is handled by Mogreet which has a nice way to do SMS (with MMS) “campaigns”. If you follow my hacks I’m a big fan of Twilio but this time they let me down by not offering MMS capabilites. I have been in touch with one of the Mogreet engineers (@danielyanisse) and he is eager to help anyone succeed on their platform.

Also a shout-out to the FullContactAPI team for helping me resolve an issue I found with their servers timeout (it was too short and therefore it constantly failed). They promptly increased the timeout.

All in all the possibilites are endles.

I.Love.APIs

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