BENGALURU: When TikTok was banned in 2020 along with many other Chinese apps in India, it paved the way for home-grown start-ups to explore short video platforms.
On Tuesday, India again banned 54 Chinese apps including CamCard for Salesforce Ent, which allows one to batch scan and digitise multiple business cards.
Technology company Zoho wants to capitalise on this and it says the company’s free app CardScanner offers users to scan business cards and capture the information on their devices or upload them to apps such as Salesforce CRM, Zoho CRM and Bigin, among others.
“The Card Scanner app uses auto edge detection technology to detect a business card when it is placed under the mobile camera. It then uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology to extract the text from the captured image,” explains Praval Singh, VP Marketing & Customer Experience, Zoho Corp. The app, used by 1,10,000 users, supports 17 global languages, and Zoho plans to support Indian languages soon.
In 2020, when several Chinese apps were banned for the first time, Zoho saw a surge in homegrown applications. At that time, the company had upgraded its Doc Scanner application and made it free for a year to fill the void left by CamScanner—one of the apps that was banned.
“That led to about 50X downloads the following week and 100X users migrated to Zoho Doc Scanner in that month,” says Singh.
According to MarketWatch, the Business Card Scanning Software market size is estimated to be worth $1.6 billion in 2021 and is forecasted to be worth $5.5 billion by 2028.
There are global players such as Sansan, Knowee, Abbyy, SamCard and ScanBizCards, among others.