ABBYY has launched a new iPhone app that manages scanned business cards separately from  the iPhone address book, and is  designed to manage business contacts separately to personal data captured from cards offered by restaurants, cafes, taxis and hairdressers, etc.

According to ABBBY, CardHolder for iPhone is intended to avoid adding “unnecessary clutter” in the iPhone address book.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology supports up to 20 different languages and once captured the contacts are able to be searched, sorted and grouped. The application recognizes contact information on a card (First Name, Last Name, Company Name, Job title, phones, faxes and e-mail addresses) and provides the ability to edit the results, including contact data classification.

“ABBYY continues to bring the benefits of OCR to a wider audience. Our new ABBYY CardHolder simplifies one of the most common usage scenarios by making the storage of business cards easy and convenient for the user. This easy-to-use digital card case with recognition technologies is perfect for business, entertainment and everyday life contacts”, said Katya Solntseva, director of Mobile Products Department at ABBYY. 

It is available for iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS with operating systems iOS 4.0 or higher theough the Apple store