Application to scan business cards

Traditional paper business cards are still the status quo but a redesigned iPhone app is helping them go digital.

Traditional paper business cards are still the status quo but a redesigned iPhone app is helping them go digital.

CardMunch, by the online professional network LinkedIn, lets users click photos of business cards and transforms them into digital contacts. It also gathers additional information about the person from LinkedIn. 'Business cards are the first point of interaction when you meet someone at a conference or event,' said Sid Viswanathan, co-founder of CardMunch. 'But imagine a world where you can scan that card and find out everything that LinkedIn has to offer on that particular individual. We're showing you more than what's on that physical card.'

Viswanathan said there are still accuracy issues with optical character recognition (OCR) technology to automate the transcription process, so the company relies on Amazon's Mechanical Turks marketplace of workers who complete tasks that computers aren't yet able to do well.

CardMunch is free. A similar app called ScanBizCards is also available for both iPhones and Android devices that uses an in-house transcription team rather than Mechanical Turks to increase privacy.