Ask HN: An app to organize business-cards ? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: An app to organize business-cards ?

5 pointsMurkin8 comments

Hello everyone,

Since starting to work on my business, I come in contact with many different professionals (engineers, lawyers, accountants etc). And I am slowly drowning in business-cards with hand written notes on them.

What applications/methods do you use to keep track of important people, their phones and comments you have on them ?

[Not everyone are on LinkedIn etc, and not every senior partner of a law firm will add you there, even if they are willing to take a phone call from you. So it needs be a one-way method].

Thanks for your time

View on HN

My boss has a miniature scanner designed for business cards. It only accepts fairly small (business-card sized!) stock, but can scan both sides simultaneously and has some combined OCR/Management software which will try and extract the information and automatically populate the contact fields. It'll keep reasonably hi-res scans of the card around as well, in case you later find the OCR wasn't quite right.

I'm pretty sure it can integrate with other contact databases, or at least export to CSV or something similar.

I'm not sure if it's exactly the same company, but http://www.cardscan.com/products/core_contact_mgmt/personal/... looks quite similar, but more recent hardware.

[No personal involvement/astroturfing, I was just impressed by how well it worked]

back in the office, and it turns out it's actually http://worldcard.penpowerinc.com/worldcard-office.html

Have you considered Evernote? You can input text or take photos. Then tag them all to keep it organized.

I would prefer a more formal way to ensure order. For instance, dedicated field for name, phone, email.

And the ability to cross-reference this information with linkedin and other entries

(e.g. all contacts I have in law firm X)

I second the Evernote suggestion..

Search in handwritten or scanned notes works surprisingly well, and tagging features make organization of business cards simple..

I use Outlook with Business Contact Manager. It was a pain to get it set up just like I wanted it, but now i am glad I did. I discard hardcopies of business cards and just manually put the info into Outlook along with any notes I want to make.

I can't believe there is no web2.0 app doing this.

Just can't seem to be able to find one.

I found this on Google. No idea if it's any good, but it might do what you're looking for:

https://www.shoeboxed.com/a/why-shoeboxed.htm

Reply on news.ycombinator.com