Business Card Scanning Service – and More

I own one of the first card scanners made by CardScan. I guess I’m a visual person where I like the contact info from a business card, but it is the logo that triggers my memory to the company and then the person. It just goes to show you the importance of branding, and a nice clean logo.

In past trade shows, we would collect all the business cards from people as well as the huge fish bowl from the door prize. We would then scan them and divide the accounts at random to our sales team.

Of course, today, sales reps at trade shows are aggressive to scan your bar code on your nametag! That’s why they use attractive people at the booths, along with neat freebie gadget giveaways!

Adam Ostrow from Mashable wrote a quick review on CloudContacts which offers a Business Card Scanning Service, and possibly more.

It’s not cheap… it starts at $29.95 for 100 cards.

Here is a partial summary from Mashable:

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The service allows you to send in your stack of business cards and have them converted to an online, exportable database. Once CloudContacts has added the data to its system, you can login to your CloudContacts account where you can see all of your contacts, complete with links to their social network profiles, all of their contact details, and even a Twitter widget showing the person’s latest tweets. If you’re the type of person that writes notes on the cards you receive – like who the person is, what they do, and some sort of anecdote – that data is also included with the contact.

Today, CloudContacts is adding another twist – the ability to send in cards via camera phone. The service generates a unique email address that you can use to send in your pictures, which will then be inputted into your contact database. This works well for situations where you only pick up a few cards as opposed to the mountain you might get after a few days at a conference.

As you might expect, this service isn’t free. There is tiered pricing for the by-mail service, which starts at $29.95 for 100 cards. The mobile option will cost you an additional $4.95 for up to 20 cards. Personally, I’d like to see a limited mobile option included with the by-mail option, but as CloudContacts advertises, this is still a big cost and time saver versus buying your own card reader, with the added bonus of an online database that connects to the top social networks.