1. A method of distilling information from a hard copy business card to generate a structured electronic file having the distilled information therein, comprising: (a) electronically scanning a platen area of a network citizen, having a business card thereon, to create a bitmap of the scanned platen area; (b) transferring the bitmap of the scanned platen area to a network processor; (c) segmenting the bitmap of the scanned platen area, using the network processor, into a bitmap object, the bitmap object corresponding to the scanned business card; (d) converting, using the network processor, the bitmap object into a block of text; (e) processing, using the network processor, the block of text to generate a structured representation of semantic entities corresponding to the scanned business card; and (f) converting, using the network processor, the structured representation into a structure text file.