August 10, 2011
Cardmunch – Free iPhone and Web App Catalogs Business Cards for you
A little over a month ago, I lamented on Twitter that I was going to enter all my collected business cards from the past three years into my computer. This set off immediate replies from no fewer than four of my followers, a much stronger reaction than I normally get for a single tweet that contains no links or hashtags. It’s a good thing I sent that tweet because I would have otherwise never learned about Cardmunch, which saved me an estimated 6 hours and 24 minutes in digitally cataloging the 164 cards I was about to enter.
The basic idea of Cardmunch is you use your iPhone to photograph a business card, then real people transcribe the information, which is saved to the Cardmunch website and app on your phone and available to export to your iPhone contacts, Mac address book and Microsoft Outlook. The app also saves original photos of your business cards so that you can flip through them like a photo album. The reason the app is free is LinkedIn bought it, so you use your LinkedIn login info for Cardmunch instead of creating a new profile and login. Cardmunch doesn’t work with Chinese text, so it wasn’t useful for 100 percent of my business cards from China.
Overall, I love Cardmunch for what I described above, and I emailed all my coworkers who have iPhones suggesting they download it. However, after trying it out as a shortcut for entering business cards collected at our Nyhus VIP Open House into Salesforce, I’ve concluded that it still saves time but is better for personal than business use.
With Cardmunch, you cannot create groups of cards to export as separate lists, you cannot have more than one Cardmunch account active on your phone at any given time the way you can with other iPhone apps such as Twitter, and you must have one LinkedIn account per Cardmunch account. Apparently you can’t create separate LinkedIn accounts with a personal and work email address, either.
All this led to my needing to create an invisible LinkedIn profile exclusively for Nyhus’ Cardmunch use and with a Nyhus email address I don’t have access to because I couldn’t use my own. I had to bug our receptionist to confirm the account when LinkedIn emailed her. Additionally, I still had a little bit of typing, copying and pasting to do after exporting Nyhus Cardmunch contacts to an Outlook (.CSV) file then importing the file to Salesforce. None of the contacts’ email address imported, and Cardmunch didn’t separate out the street, city, state, and zip code parts of addresses into different spreadsheet columns. I should also note that I wasn’t on a tight deadline for this task, but I had a turnaround time of about 4 p.m. to the next morning as a result of real people transcribing the cards.
I hope this post was useful to those of you who network frequently and have iPhones. Let us know other thoughts on technology and apps for expediting business card cataloging in the comments.
Note: Thanks to Adam Daniel Mezei, Elysa Rice, Veronica Wei Sopher, and Debra Trapen for responding to my tweet mentioned above and inspiring this post.