CardMunch Review

Though great proponents of everything digital, we're still yet to ascend to a totally paperless existence. Receipts and business cards are two things that always seem to be piling up.

In our efforts to clear our business card mountain, we've had a crack at digitising some of them with LinkedIn's CardMunch app.

Here's how it works. You open the app and take a photo of a business card you want to save. That photo then gets sent off to a team of "manual transcribers" who type out the contact info on the card, then send it back to you. In practice, this process took about 10 minutes.

But of course we wanted to see what would happen if we submitted something that wasn't strictly a business card, so we snapped a toll receipt for Memorial Bridge in Parkersburg, West Virginia and sent that off too. It took twice as long as the others to be processed, but came back with a listing under the name of Memorial Bridge, and a work address of Parkersburg, West Virginia. Touché, CardMunch.

However, our "Hi! What's your name?" written flirtation received the "Cannot read name" CardMunch cold shoulder within minutes.

Each business card photo is stored alongside the contact listing so it's easy to double check the details and edit any mistakes. We only had one, involving a particularly U-shaped V. Uideo, anyone?

For the serial networkers out there, the real benefit is that by using the info scraped from a card you can immediately connect to a person's LinkedIn profile without having to search. You can even set the app to do this automatically.

And if you're prone to forgetting who a card belongs to, you can add notes with your scan to jog your memory, so there's no forgetting that you met Memorial Bridge that time in June when you drove over him.