Business cards may seem like a throwback to a simpler time, but they’re still in high use today. I carted a sheaf of them to Macworld Expo recently and came back with a fistful of new ones to integrate. WorldCard Mobile from Penpower — which gave me a $5.99 copy of its app to evaluate — makes card entry and organization painless.

It’s a little bit of a miracle for this old dog to point my iPhone at a card, snap a picture and then have it Recognize the card and its fields, and slip them into my Contacts app. Often this happened without a shred of extra work on my part. Sometimes I had to make an edit or two. I even had an arty business card that used a very stylized “A” in the middle of the contact’s name. WorldCard Mobile never blinked at the challenge. Mary got her first name plugged in automatically.

There’s features to share cards and contacts over email, and the app files its own “stack” of cards. It also stores the original photo of the card for reference. A very useful feature gives you the ability to take an email signature block and recognize it into the WorldCard database. There’s more editing needed on a signature block than a card, but it saves a lot of work of cutting and pasting, old-style.

There are not a lot of features in World Card Mobile. That decision follows classic app design, to do something really well and not gunk up the rest of the app. At $5.99 it will pay for itself within the first hour you use it on business cards. You gotta figure it will work with the new iPad 2, which will include the product’s first back-facing camera.

Highly recommended. There’s no end in sight to the business card. But using an iPhone or iPad with WorldCard Mobile to put these into a database is a nice upgrade to the old card scanner + software solutions. This is also a great example of how an app for iPhone can beat any desktop Mac application, just by focusing on one good thing.

As the Consumer Electronics Show wraps up, the week uncapped numbers that might give a small business user concern about choosing Apple’s solutions: the iPhone, the iPad, perhaps even the Mac itself. Estimates now show more phones using Android, Google’s phone operating systems, than Apple’s iOS iPhones.

The developments can be parsed to show Android is moving to a dominant position in the market. One marketing analyst I know thinks Android’s wide-open structure for app development is the key to making Google’s Android Number 1, and adds that it’s a ranking that will draw more interest from developers. That might translate into fewer apps for the iPhone/iPad user. It’s a horse race mentality, this analysis, one designed for the short attention span.

Is this really all we want? “Wow, we’re selling the most!” Because our lives seem littered with stuff that’s top-of-the-charts, but sucks to own. There’s got to be a higher goal to aim for than “We sell more than anybody else.” Great for the vendor, and a real home run for the marketeer. Not so great for the buyer of products to run a small business, where there’s less room for a mistake in acquiring these tools.

A Google exec said in Walt Mossberg’s WSJ column that today’s Android is a product for early adopters. Maturity is still in the future for this iPhone/iPad alternative. Google gives away the OS, while Apple sells its app technology. There’s accountability for quality in the Apple model, and virtually none in Google’s.

But my analyst friend Guy Smith of Silicon Marketing Strategies believes that when a lot of companies start to use something that’s free, “that is an indicator of an acceptable level of maturity.” This all smells like the Windows dog-pile of two decades ago, and I do mean smells.
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A two for one sale that ends today leads a list of discounted products and services that might make nice gifts for the Apple product user heading into business in 2011. Filemaker has a sale on its flagship Filemaker 11 database that includes a second copy free along with a purchased license.

The database is a genuine value at its list price, and so an extraordinary asset at half-off. Businesses which share contacts and relationships might help one another with this Filemaker deal. It expires on December 22. Details are at the Filemaker website, which lets users obtain a second license code for another business to use.

• Macworld is offering $50 off the Conference Package of your choice, or $25 off a 1-Day Users Conference pass. Discounts expire on Dec. 26. Registration is at the site for Macworld 2011, which runs Jan. 26-29.

• A $14.99 price for the Quickoffice Connect Mobile Suite for iPad is available until Dec. 31. The latest version of the suite to create, edit, and share Microsoft Word and Excel files, and view PowerPoint files adds support for iOS 4.2, multi-tasking, access to Huddle and SugarSync, and external keyboard support. Discounts available at the site.

• Appigo is running a 99-cent sale on its iPad and iPhone apps through January 1. The price is a significant discount off the $4.99 price to ToDo for the iPad, an extensive tool that’s ideal for a mobile business pro tracking projects and tasks. There’s also a Notebook, AccuFuel and Corkulous app on sale, along with an iPhone version of Todo.

Filemaker has announced a new Business Productivity Kit which works with its new Filemaker 11 database, a collection of charts and reports that are “a fast-track way for small businesses to get instant results and grow their businesses,” according to VP of marketing and services Ryan Rosenberg. The kit is available as a free download from the Filemaker site and includes a 30-day trial copy of Filemaker 11.

While Filemaker has also made a run at small business with its $39 basic-level Bento database, Filemaker 11 is worth the extra $140. The Productivity Kit includes templates — ready-made database reports — to serve companies dealing in either goods or services. The Standard Edition Kit is aimed at sellers of goods, while the Service Edition includes templates for, well, services companies.

Filemaker 11 does ship with a raft of templates already, many suitable for the business user. But the company promises that the new kit’s free templates are “an integrated set of business tools and each module ties to the other, eliminating any need for duplicate fields, tables and data re-entry.”

The biggest advance in Filemaker 11 may well be its charting, and the Kit proposes to make that power ready to use, along with what the company calls “on-the-fly” reporting.

After a few days building and experimenting with the Bento database, it’s plain that the Filemaker advantages of customization are well worth its lift in cost. Starting with a set of templates that you can customize gives a small business room to grow and expand to new opportunities. Filemaker even includes a guide to database basics and one for working with Microsoft Office in the Productivity Kit.

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A few years ago Filemaker released the Bento database, a slimmed down and gussied up version of it’s flagship product. Bento has grown up over those years, and now Filemaker has skimmed off some of its easy to use features in a version 1.0 for the iPad. I had a dream of making this pocket-sized product do some of the work that a mobile pro, like my wife the yoga teacher, would need in classrooms. Alas, the iPad Bento can’t perform those deep poses yet.

That doesn’t mean the product isn’t worth the $4.99 it costs at the App Store. Bento arrived with a one-page home screen meant to serve as a manual, a handful of database templates (these are called Libraries in Bento) and three skins to style my creations.

But say, for example, you wanted to assign several attributes to an item in an inventory. iPad Bento doesn’t get the idea of multiple tick boxes for one record. It wants you to create a field for every attribute like overseas item, tax free, custom sized and the like.

As a database Bento has gotten so minimalistic in its mobile versions that it seems suited only for a very personal information manager. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s good to know going on how much you can fit into this Bento’s box.

Inventory is among the business uses shown for the Bento iPad version

The new Bento for iPad screenshots are on display this morning, courtesy of media rep Kevin Mallon at Filemaker. In the set on Flickr are several shots that illustrate how this combination of the Apple tablet and Apple-subsidiary’s base-level database can drive a business’s data needs.

Filemaker has always benefited from business interest in its products. There’s only so much cataloging of the garage, the music and film collections, the stacks of books or model trains you can do with a database. Filemaker grew off the backs of small business needs. Bento is a tool robust enough to serve a small business, but with a plucked feature set to get average tasks done.

Databases need data entry devices desperately, so a keyboard has seemed essential to their success. Bento has an iPhone app that has won great reviews. But significant amounts of data entry require a keyboard. This is a lesson learned at commercial IT enterprises, like the sort I cover for the HP market. The mouse-click always fell far behind the productivity of fingers on keys. So this app will be one of the more severe tests of the iPad’s built-in soft keyboard.

Filemaker was being coy about the crossover pricing on iPad and iPhone versions of this app. (Some iPhone apps will be running at no extra charge on the iPad right away.) We’d expect about $9.95 on release, because Apple’s selling the iWork apps at that price.