CardMunch for LinkedIn

I was just down at the Best of Breed conference in Tampa, which was 200 IT executives invited to talk about the future of IT deliver and how disruptive technologies like mobility, social media, and cloud computing were going to affect business IT for the next few years.  Very interesting debates and conversations were happening all over the place, and I was really glad I decided to go.

Today I just wanted to share with you a really cool Apple iOS application that someone showed me called CardMunch for LinkedIn.  (Unfortunately only for Apple iOS right now.)

LinkedIn has been an interesting platform for a while.  Most business owners that I know have gone out and created a profile in LinkedIn, but at the same time, most of them have had a hard time figuring what to do as the next step.  I certainly cannot claim to be an expert at LinkedIn networking, but if you do have a profile, CardMunch can be handy at dealing with another aspect of networking that we use:

Dealing with business cards.

We all have them.  We all trade them.   But how to use them effectively?  I have a big stack of them under my monitor right now.  When I need information, I sort through them, find the card I want, and make my call or send the email.  Every time I have to sort through my pile, I think about buying one of those dedicated business card scanners.   But then I get busy and go about my day.

With CardMunch, I saw business owners exchange business cards, take a picture of it, and then hand the card back.   I think I only ended up giving out a dozen cards over 3 days because most people handed it back to me.  It was amazing.

So what happens is after you take the picture of someone’s business card, you submit it to CardMunch.  People (not computers) at CardMunch transcribe all of the information for you and then submit it back for your use.  I’ve submitted a couple dozen so far and all of the data has been accurate.

Once you get the contact info back into the application, there are some options for you:

1.  Connect to that person in LinkedIn (go figure this is the main button).
2. Download the contact to your Contacts – this is the part that got me excited because my Contacts on my iPad are of course synced with my Office 365 email with means that contact is now available everywhere for me.
3. Full-text search – you know it was Jeff something something who lived in Texas – well now you can find him!

And the best part?  As of right now, the service is FREE!  Wohoo!   I’m guessing that it probably won’t be free forever, but this is a service that I can see actually paying a few dollars for because it is just that darn handy.

Check it at www.cardmunch.com

Oh, last bit – the app is iPhone sized, but it does work on an iPad.

Jamie