At WATEC 2011, a business contact showed me CardMunch, the latest cool application to capture business cards. LinkedIn just unveiled a completely revamped version of CardMunch, which it bought from Bowei Gai at the end of 2010. CardMunch is a free iPhone application that let you scrape business cards for vital information. You snap a picture of the business card, and CardMunch 3.0 ties that business card with the person's LinkedIn profile. This gives you insight into mutual contacts, credentials, recommendations, etc.
What makes CardMunch powerful is its Cover Flow-like Rolodex feature. No more card scanners at exhibitions necessary; MunchCard lets you swipe through virtual business cards of all of your contacts. You can also add notes to contact cards while you wait for the cards to be processed.
You can also quickly add information from your contact’s CardMunch record to your iPhone address book. LinkedIn does not do this by default for all contacts, which shows you that LinkedIn truly cares about privacy. It is possible to send quick e-mails to contacts from within the application. It is also possible to initiate a LinkedIn connection request, but once "connect" is pressed, it cannot be undone.
It’s a great and free application to swipe business cards at exhibitions. Hopefully, LinkedIn will add some more features, such as: to "favorite" a contact, to sort contacts by company name/the date the picture of the card was taken, or to record the location where the card was scanned (e.g., Curapipe at WATEC 2011)
To grab the free CardMunch Application from the App Store, click here.
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