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Apps bring business cards into the 21st century

INNOVATION ECONOMY

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February 19, 2012|By Scott Kirsner

Have you noticed how, in our increasingly digital era, we still hand each other scraps of paper when we first meet?

These little rectangles accumulate in pockets, purses, and desk drawers. In the 20th century, we knew what to do with them: staple them to other pieces of paper and insert those pieces into a device called a Rolodex. The number of Rolodexes on a person’s desk was an indicator of power and influence.

In the 21st century, though, we want phone numbers and e-mail addresses to be digitally accessible. I have been exploring the best ways to accomplish that - by scanning cards, photographing them with a mobile phone, mailing them to someone else to deal with, or trying to avoid exchanging cards entirely. The only strategy I have eschewed is typing the information in myself.

It was a Cambridge company, CardScan, that in 1994 introduced one of the first desktop scanning devices for business cards; now the company is part of the Newell Rubbermaid conglomerate. The least expensive CardScan device sells for $159. It occupies precious desktop real estate, and you will still have to do a bit of data jiggering after the scan, since the software doesn’t always put names, titles, and companies into the proper fields.

But cheap software is starting to create big problems for the scanner business. A number of mobile apps, some available free of charge, allow you to use the camera on a newer iPhone, BlackBerry, or Android phone to snap photos of business cards. The apps then either try to recognize the characters, enlist a human to type in the card text, or both.

CardMunch tops the card app list, because it does a great deal, and it’s free. Unfortunately, it’s only available for the iPhone, with no plans announced for an Android version.

Given a decent picture of a business card, CardMunch not only returns perfect data in the proper fields, but it also tries to find the person’s profile on LinkedIn, the business networking site. (LinkedIn bought the company in January 2011.) The app gives you the ability to connect with the person via LinkedIn, and also to export their contact info to your iPhone’s address book.

Why does it work so well? CardMunch doesn’t bother trying to automatically recognize the text on the card; instead it sends the digital image to an army of self-employed typists around the world who act as your outsourced secretaries in exchange for a few pennies per card. To ensure accuracy, each card is typed in by as many as four workers, and the results compared. CardMunch promises a 24-hour turnaround time, though the actual results can be much quicker.