[UPDATE 5/8/2014: LinkedIn announced that it is discontinuing this app effective 7/11/2014, and that it is recommending that CardMuch users instead use Evernote. Click here for more info.]
Last week, I reviewed ABBYY Business Card Reader, a $5 app that uses sophisticated OCR to read the names and numbers off of a business card so that you can create a contact entry without having to type all of that information by hand. Florida attorney Katie Floyd of the great Mac Power Users podcast posted a comment on that post suggesting that I check out a similar app called CardMunch. CardMunch also lets you scan business cards with your iPhone, but it takes a very different approach.
First, the app is free; the professional social network LinkedIn owns the app and gives it away. More about this in a moment.
Second, as reported by Matt Lynley of Business Insider, the app doesn't use optical character recognition (OCR) to read your business cards. Instead, it uses a service owned by Amazon called Mechanical Turk, a service that hires real people to do simple, repetitive tasks. The pay is low, but Mechanical Turk workers have very flexible hours and can work at home, so for many it is an easy way to supplement their income. Because real people look at the image of the business card and then type the information, the accuracy of CardMunch is much higher than the OCR used by ABBYY Business Card Reader.
Here is an extreme example of how valuable this can be. A while back, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak (who goes by "Woz") gave me his business card, and it is unlike any other business card you've ever seen. It is made out of stainless steel and is laser-cut. I've heard it said that you could cut a steak with this business card, and I suppose that is possible. When I tried to scan the card with ABBYY Business Card Reader, the app simply couldn't recognize it. No surprise; it is etched metal and difficult to read. Even more curious, the phone number is presented in a format similar to a standardized test with numbers punched out on a grid. However, when I scanned it with CardMunch, the Mechanical Turk worker was able to figure out that it was Steve Wozniak and sent me back an entry, although I see that even that person couldn't figure out the 408-888-8888 phone number from the card. (Note: I'm not giving out anything private here; Woz has advertised that number ever since he acquired it in the 1970s back when he used it as a dial-a-joke number.)
On the other hand, you need to have Internet access for CardMunch to read a card, and the scan process can take much longer. In my tests it took about 15 minutes, but I've seen others post on the Internet that it sometimes takes several hours. ABBYY Business Card Reader, by comparison, can read a card in few seconds. Having said that, the CardMunch app doesn't make you wait. Just scan one or more cards and let the app send off the images. You can then return to the app minutes or hours later and you will notified if you have new contact entries that have been processed.
Third, because the app is owned by LinkedIn, the app (or perhaps more accurately, the Mechanical Turk employee) will try to match the business card with a resume on LinkedIn. If CardMunch finds a LinkedIn entry, your contact will contain information from the person's LinkedIn profile. For example, you can see in that scan of the Woz business card that it provides me with information not on the card itself, such as the fact that he is a Fellow at Apple, his photograph, etc. It is a little strange — some might say creepy? — to scan a simple business card and get back a contact entry that includes additional information such as a photograph of the person, employment history, schools attended, etc. On the other hand, this is all public information that the person has decided to put on LinkedIn, so you shouldn't feel too voyeuristic, and it can quite be useful to have all of this information regarding the person who just handed you a busines card.
Herr is the result from scanning my own card, which led to results from my own LinkedIn profile plus phone numbers from my card. I'm not sure why the Mechanical Turk worker who read my own business card called the main number at my office my "home" number; it is clearly labled "Main" on the card itself.
If the person cannot be found on LinkedIn, then you just get back a simple contact entry that only contains the information from the card that the Mechanical Turk worker was able to read.
CardMunch doesn't have some of the advanced features of ABBY Business Card Holder such as the ability to sort by different attibutes and the ability to assign groups to different contacts. On the other hand, just like the ABBYY app, CardMunch does give you the option of keeping the contact in the app itself and/or sending the contact information to your iPhone's Contacts.
Note that when you share from CardMunch to the main Contacts app you don't get all of the LinkedIn information such as the profile photograph, website, biographical information, etc.; it appears that the app only share the information taken from the card itself.
Katie Floyd warned me about checking out the Settings app on the iPhone and then scrolling down to the entry for CardMunch. There is an option called "Auto Connect" and if you have it turned on, every time the app scans a business card of someone who has a profile on LinkedIn, it automatically sends a request to become a LinkedIn Connection. You might not want to become a connection of the guy trying to sell you life insurance who just handed you a business card, so make sure that this is turned off if you don't want to use the feature. (For me, it was turned off by default.)
I am torn on whether to recommend ABBY Business Card Reader or CardMunch. I suppose that it is nice that CardMunch is free versus the $5 for the ABBYY app, but when an app is free that just makes me wonder what else they are doing to make money off of me. What does LinkedIn do with the information on the business cards that are scanned? I don't know the answer, and frankly I'm trying to decide how much I even care. It's not like I often receive business cards from private celebrities or political disidents who are trusting me to keep their contact information confidential from a third party liked LinkedIn, but I can't help but wonder about this.
As for the use of Mechanical Turk and the use of LinkedIn profiles, there are clear advantages to getting scan results that are not only more accurate, but in many cases even more complete than the information on the card itself. On the other hand, if speed is important, you'll want an app like the one from ABBYY that performs the OCR itself in a matter of seconds.
There are other apps in the App Store that let you scan and handle business cards with the iPhone and I don't plan to do an exhaustive review of all of them. Nevertheless, the approach taken by CardMunch is so different from the ABBYY apps that I reviewed last week that I thought it would be interesting to compare and contrast them. Whichever app you choose, you'll save yourself a lot of time and hassle entering contact information manually, and you have the helpful ability to decide whether you want the contact to remain in the app or be moved to your main Contacts database.
Click here for CardMunch (free): 
Click here to get ABBYY Business Card Reader ($4.99):
Click here to get ABBYY CardHolder ($2.99):
