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Gahlord
Dewald, in a column for Inman News, focuses on a new iPhone app that helps
digitize that ever growing pile of business cards.
"I
don't know about you," admits Dewald, "but for me, the percentage of cards that
I'm handed that make it into a usable digital format is lower than I'd like."
Then
Dewald discovered an iPhone app that solves the problem. CardMunch.
CardMunch
is different from the other business card readers on the market, because people
actually transcribe the information; it's not a machine trying to figure it out.
"Most
other card readers try to use machine recognition to figure out what's written
on the business card." explains Dewald, "If
you've used any of these you know that you may spend as much time correcting
the results as you would've spent just typing the data into your contact
manager in the first place. Using human beings gives far better results, and
CardMunch does that."
"Real
Humans, Not Computers" says the CardMunch website. Each business card is
transcribed, edited and reviewed for accuracy. They offer a mobile Rolodex to
access your cards, a full text search to find that elusive name or number and
the flexibility to store your contacts in your iPhone address book or CardMunch.
And
for that inevitable moment when the phone goes blank and your data is lost,
CardMunch backs up and syncs all your contacts to your web account allowing you
to recover all the information.
"Another
handy trick with Cardmunch is that you can immediately send a LinkedIn request
(LinkedIn recently bought Cardmunch) and a follow-up e-mail. So all that
post-conference follow-up can happen much more quickly and painlessly." Says Dewald
As
good as the app is, Dewald notes, it isn't perfect. Human errors happen, so be sure to check the card
data with the original business card. Dewald found that if the data isn't
correct, you need to reject it from the app itself, which he says is not as
simple as it could be.
"Even
so, double-checking the data and rejecting the few cards that aren't
transcribed properly still takes a lot less time than entering the data in
yourself." he says.
This app is only available for the iPhone, but a Blackberry app is in the works.
Read
the full review by Gahlord Dewald at Inman News.
 photo credit: grabbingsand
Posted on March 15, 2011 11:37:29 by  IPTV.Boyz
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