Business cards are a relic of the analog age. They tend to sit, unused and unloved, in a Rolodex at the back of your desk or in the nether reaches of a wallet or purse.
CardMunch has the perfect solution to bring business cards into the modern world: an iPhone app that scans business cards and automatically adds the resulting contact information to your iPhone contacts list.
The big difference between CardMunch and other scanning apps like Google Googles: CardMunch guarantees 100% accuracy because it doesn't use technology like optical character recognition (OCR) to decode what's on each card. According to CEO Bowei Gai, free services might offer 90% accuracy--but that translates to one wrong digit in a ten-digit phone number, making the service totally useless.
To ensure perfection, CardMunch sends each scanned over the Internet to multiple human beings who read it, key in the information, and send it back to your phone. Turnaround time is usually a couple minutes, although it can take up to 10.
CardMunch charges $0.25 per card for this service, but offers 20 free scans to get you started. The company is also planning a subscription service; interested SAI readers can email beta@cardmunch.com to sign up for beta invites.
The app launched in August, and tomorrow the company launches version 2.0. The most interesting new feature is one-click integration with LinkedIn. Sign in to LinkedIn from the app, and you'll be able to take any scanned contact and send them an invitation to connect on LinkedIn with a single click.
The new version of the app also has full text search of all fields and a "mobile Rolodex" feature that lets you scan through cards, CoverFlow style. Version 2.0 of the app is free (the previous version cost $2.99) and will be available in the App Store tomorrow.
