Business Card Scanning Apps

In true Evernote style, their latest creation Evernote Hello has completely reengineered the way people network. The app weaves together LinkedIn, business card scanning, location logging, calendar scheduling, email, and contact management to create the ultimate business relationship builder. Evernote Hello bases its hierarchy on meetings and locations to better help the user recall the contact they’re saving and the context it's under. The app then launches a powerful business card scanner that lights, scans, and interprets all of the contact information on the card into the address book attached to that meeting. What is perhaps the best feature in Evernote Hello is that it gives the user plenty of ways to maintain that new relationship in the future, making it a business person's must have.

CamCard is one of the most fully-featured business card scanners on the App Store. In addition to accurate business card scanning, it supports a number of additional functions that one may need with contact management such as: batch scanning, card holder, QR code scanning, exporting to Excel, and auto-crop. The batch scanning feature is especially useful when you come away from an event with a stack of business cards from new contacts. With other apps you have to save the contact info to your phone, then scan again, but with this app you can scan lots of cards and add them to your contacts at once.

Google Search is a great "swiss army knife" of an app in that it bundles together a lot of great Google services. It includes the really useful feature, Google Goggles. What was originally intended as a scan and search feature has a great use case with business card scanning and contact creation. The one downside is that if the business card is non-traditional or has a lot of graphics, Google Goggles will start an image search instead of saving the information.

Business Card Reader by Shape GmbH is one of the more solid business card scanners on the App Store. Although it lacks the innovation of its counterparts, it’s simple to start, uses an extremely accurate scanner, and has a clean interface that’s easy to navigate. It also loops in LinkedIn connectivity to make syncing contacts cross-platform a breeze. At $4.99, we would expect nothing less.

The functionality of Yolu card differs from other business card scanners out there in that it additionally allows the user to create a “digital business card” of their own based either a scan of their business card or their LinkedIn profile information. The user is then allowed to share that digital business card with other Yolu users nearby. If only it wasn’t bound to just Yolu users, that feature would have been far more useful. Other than that, the scanner is simple, accurate, and creates a new contact for you in just a few moments.

ABBYY Business Card Reader is a pretty solid app. It struggled a bit with fancy cards, but it supports 20 languages, including multilingual cards. It also lets you search social networks, merge data with existing contacts, open maps directly, phone the number and send SMS messages from within the app. Its business card library is quite simple, no fancy coverflow here.

For those that want a simple and reliable business card scanner, LinkedIn’s CardMunch is a good option. Within just a few taps, you can view or scan collected business cards, and have them stored in one central location. The drawback to this app is that once the scan is saved, it is then uploaded to LinkedIn for manual transcription into contact form, and then returned to you. Until then, you’re left with just a picture.

CardShark is worth mentioning because it's integrated directly with the pipeline management platform, Salesforce. For those in business development, using CardShark to directly input business card information into Salesforce can be huge efficiency boost. However, the app suffers from the same drawbacks as CardMunch in that the information is submitted for manual transcription, so turnaround does leave something to be desired. For those who use Salesforce as a business hub, CardShark is a huge time saver. Otherwise, keep your options open.