I always have a problem with business cards, and I am pretty sure it is because I have weird requirements.
I don’t get a lot of cards, so I don’t need a crazy high-volume solution. I don’t (usually) want to add people to my address book or LinkedIn or anything like that, and I don’t (usually) want to scan them to PDFs on my computer.
I also (usually) want to capture the business cards as close to the source of reception as possible[1] , which is often in my hotel room or at an event, where I don’t have a scanner with me.[2]
I like to store my business cards in Evernote where I let their storage and OCR take care of things, so what I really want is a mobile app that makes it fast and easy to capture business cards and send them to Evernote.[3]
I have tried many different business card scanning apps, but the one that I keep coming back to is CamCard, which is available for both iOS and Android. I reviewed CamCard in the summer.
I like CamCard a lot for a variety of reasons, but mainly I love the Batch Mode where I can quickly capture card after card after card and process later. I don’t know why more business cards apps don’t do this. CamCard’s Batch Mode is why I wanted to use it as opposed to more generic mobile scanning apps.
As much as I love CamCard, it has one significant shortcoming for my workflow: it doesn’t export to Evernote.
I was always bummed about this and it is what was stopping me from using it regularly until I stumbled upon this great blog post by Joseph Lo: IPhone + CamCard + Evernote = Complete Business Card Management.
It looks like Joseph has more or less the same workflow as I do, but he is clearly smarter than I am because he figured out a way to send the cards to Evernote.
After the business cards are digitized and saved into the iPhone’s contact database, the next step i did is to export the information to Evernote. While CamCard does not have direct evernote integration, it is possible for CamCard to send the contact info as an email and since Evernote support emails as part of the input process, the integration between CamCard and Evernote is pretty seamless to me. What I like about this email method is that the actual business card image will be appended at the end of the email! Very clever of CamCard.
While I would prefer it CamCard had direct Evernote integration, this is not bad and works well. Check out the Joseph’s post for the step-by-step instructions.
What do you do to capture your business cards?
(Photo by matthew solle)
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This is so that I don’t need to bring the paper home with me, and to make it more likely that I will actually process them instead of leaving them in a pile in a drawer or my bag. ↩
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If I was more of a regular traveller, I might take a ScanSnap S1100 or something with me, but I am not that hardcore. ↩
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You are probably thinking “Why not just use a scanning app?” Easy tiger, I’ll get to that. ↩
