CardMunch - Wow, well done LinkedIn!

I have tried a number of business card scanners, from the old USB jobs that actually scanned your cards to the iPhone apps that work off of pictures. Each of these was way more work than they were worth. Business cards are odd things in their design. So optical character recognition can only go so far.

But LinkedIn has paired man and machine into a crowdsourced miracle with their app CardMunch. Just like the other apps, you take a picture of a business card. But then you upload it. A few minutes later, you get a delightful little apple munching sound that accompanies the notification that your card has been processed.

What did the app do? Well, it sent your picture to India, where somebody keystroked it in (no doubt using some OCR preprocessing). So far, out of nearly 1,000 business cards, I have yet to see a mistake. Better still, if the card is from someone with a LinkedIn profile, you get all of that profile information added to your contacts. The new card is available in LinkedIn, on your phone app or is uploadable into contacts.

How much does the app cost? Nothing. How much does the keystroking cost? Nothing.

I'm not naive. I know that LinkedIn is developing an incredible database off of my information. I am an IT executive, so the cards I send in have high potential value as probable decision makers. But that's ok with me; the whole idea behind business cards is to get your information out to the public.