LinkedIn acquires CardMunch, now making it free for everyone to use | Hacker News Reader

LinkedIn acquires CardMunch, now making it free for everyone to use

cardmunch.posterous.com

60 pointsdshankar11 comments

The bright side: LinkedIn have the budget/experience to create Android/Blackberry versions.

The down side: LinkedIn's current blackberry app is really terrible, I'm sure anyone who's used it will agree with me on that. (Certainly the appstore reviews do.) Can't speak to their Android/iPhone apps... are they any good?

I almost never use the LinkedIn iPhone app. The functionality is so limited that I'm almost always better off using the browser.

Huge congrats to CardMunch!

It's always nice to see LinkedIn make an acquisition like this as they are quite rare for their company. It's too bad because LinkedIn could definitely use the infusion of some more entrepreneurial talent and it would give startups another good exit path. The last few times LinkedIn has raised money, they have cited future acquisitions as one of the main reasons, but CardMuch is the first one I've heard about in a long time.

After Googling, it doesn't appear that there is a Android app of CardMunch. Or am I mistaken?

Nor a blackbeery app... Though id prefer an android one.

Just iPhone right now, I've been bugging them for an Android app for a month or two now :).

Congrats guys: go CMU alums!

What does CardMunch do that Google Goggles doesn't? So far, Google Goggles has been quite good at scanning business cards for me and adding them to my contacts.

More accurate due to using humans (Mechanical Turk) rather than OCR. Allows even some handscribbled notes to be transcribed.

Yeah baby! Mazeltov Bowei, Sid, Sudeep, and Manu!

So how do they make money?

My bet would be that they just tie it into LinkedIn so it becomes a way for people to make connections on LinkedIn easier - this leads to more usage and revenue for LinkedIn.

They used to charge but it is free now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com