[ale] portable scanners

[Cy Kurtz]

Any thoughts on a portable scanner?

First of all, everyone congratulate me. I bought a restaurant. Yippee!

Ok, now I have a need to scan business cards and checks at the restaurant. My 
hope is to scan in business cards and checks as they arrive and have the 
device store the info in, idunno, jpg, tif or some other format.

At the end of the day, I'll take the scanner home and plug it into my home 
computer(hopefully a usb port), and suck all the data off of it. I can then 
type it all into some sort of contact database.

<ramble>If the scanner has OCR software, which I think many do, I might even 
be able to import it into something. I'm using Kmail right now, but I like 
evolution's contact portion better. I wonder if Open Office has a way to 
manage contacts.</ramble> 

Most of the portable scanners I have seen so far are meant to be used with a 
computer - I'm looking for one that can stand alone  - and they have software 
to automagically import the data into outlook or some other M$ nonsense - 
can't stand M$ it's got to be OS.

So, there you have it .. lots of questions .. . .  .  .    .    .

Thank you,

Cy Kurtz