Update: CardMunch by LinkedIn

Date:  June 26, 2012

Some times ago, I recommend to use Cardmunch by LinkedIn as a business card management app.

Previous Post:  http://miniliew.blogspot.sg/2011/12/great-business-card-app-cardmunch.html

 

 

Today, after many months later, let's look at it again, and see if I am happy.

It now has a user login website.  i.e. http://cardmunch.com/user/login

 

 

Again, on the website, it explains how it works.  It is not OCR, it is not machine read.  All these name cards are transcribed by real people.  Real people read the cards and fills in the contact for you, and push it to your LinkedIn account.

 

 

There aren't a lot of things you can do on the website.  It showed how many jobs has been submitted, and how many has been transcribed.  I found that it is getting slower, I think it is becaue of the gaining of popularity of this App.

 

 

A click on the contact, it shows you the contact details, as well as the scanned card.

 

Ok, I think the user web site is still very primitive.  But there is a "Export Contacts Beta" link where you can download this as a CSV file and see it in your Excel.

 

And the other option is to save it to a Mac OS X .VSF Address Book File.

 

 

This is the fastest way to bring your contact around with you as a Excel spreadsheet.

 

 

Once i it is downloaded, you can simply open the CSV file.

 

 

All the contact info, title, company, phone, mobile phone, address info are there.

 

 

As a result, after many months of using it.  I still recommend it.  Some people are very afraid about privacy.  Well, you do have a LinkedIn account, right, so, in any way, the Cloud will still get your info either way.  I think CardMunch has bring the business card application to another step.  I owned about 2-3 different business card readers.  Non of them works well.  Most of the OCR are crappy.  Thanks to many innovative designer who design the card so ugly.  CardMunch isn't perfect, but it is sufficient for me.  I need to make sure that my cards are stored in the cloud.  I need to make sure that when I need the contacts, I am able to access it with or without Internet.  And when I change iPhone, I should be able to retrieve my cards and contacts.  That's it.