This is quite a cool idea. It’s a tiny portable scanner for scanning in business cards into your computer. I collect a dozen or so business cards on every trip, all of which end up in a mess on my top draw, ordered in a sort of last-in first-out filing system. I did a search and found out that the average businessman spends 28 minutes a day looking for lost pieces of information, but I couldn’t find any statistics for the average businesswoman. I’m sure it’s a lot less though…

With one of these HP gadgets, as you get a new card you can just feed it into the miniature scanner and it’s stored directly on your computer. The scanned images can be converted into text using built-in optical character recognition technology, and can be imported directly into Outlook – if you’re still using such a hazardous mail client, but I guess you can import the scanned vCards into another client fairly easily.

These miniature, black and white scanners cost only $70 including cable, software, and carrying case. Tell your boss you spend half an hour a day looking for lost information and he or she will either sack you, or buy you one of these like a shot.

Available from USB Geek.