By Marion Rhodes
CTA Social Media Director
The 2013 ATA Convention is less than two months away, and if you’re heading to San Antonio this November, you’re likely going to return with a stack of business cards. Since I dread adding all those contact details into my address book by hand, I thought I’d let you know about a neat little iPhone app I found that makes organizing your business contacts a lot less tedious.
The app is called CardMunch and is available in the Apple App Store for free. Here’s what it does: It allows you to take a photo of any business card with your phone, which will then be transcribed into a digital contact book you can access from your phone or computer. The information on the card is being transcribed by real humans to ensure accuracy and is usually returned within 24 hours, at which point it will automatically be pushed to the CardMunch app and available at your fingertips wherever you go.
The contact details are stored along with the image of the physical business card, and tapping on a contact’s website URL, email address or phone number automatically opens the corresponding application.
My favorite feature of CardMunch, however, is the fact that it is linked with LinkedIn. If your contact has a LinkedIn profile, CardMunch will include that profile information in the digital contact book – even if no LinkedIn reference is given on the business card. So your digital contact book will not only include the person’s email address, phone number, website, etc., but also the summary information provided on his or her LinkedIn profile, as well as specialties, experience, education, skills, recommendations, etc.
As much as I enjoy the look and feel of a physical business card, I must say that CardMunch has turned out to be a real time-saver for me over the past few months and allowed me to stop worrying about how to store all of those business cards I’ve accumulated over the years. I highly recommend it to any iPhone user. Unfortunately, there are currently no versions for Android or Blackberry users, but this might change in the not too distant future. In the meantime, here is a list of similar apps, some of which are also available for Android.
