I really like this. I’ll read up on some business card scanners. As for LinkedIn, there are some social network aggregators that offer integration services in LinkedIn as well as Twitter, Facebook… I would not say its on the horizon, but it is something we have been looking into.

I know what you mean. I was thinking about something else. For example, Refworks and other bibliographic apps can search and self-populate records (in that case books) with data (ISBN, title, author) mined from Google Scholar, Amazon, Library of Congress….

Could be very useful for recruiting agency and HR, and more generally busy exec. For example, you could select the contact info at the end of an email, “scan” it and self-populate a new record for that person/company.

Here is an alternate method for scanning business cards and getting the contact into Solve.  If you have an Android phone, you can download Google Goggles from the app marketplace.  It is free. 

Google Goggles does all sorts of amazing things, but one of its simpler features is the ability to scan business cards using your Android phone’s camera.  Once scanned, the contact data can be added into your Google Contacts.  From there, the existing Solve/Google sync will pull it into Solve.  It is a beta app, and some “creative” business cards seem to give it problems, but “normal” cards seem to work well.

See this page for more info: http://www.google.com/mobile/goggles/#contact

Thanks,

Kevin

http://www.servletsuite.com/mecard.htm

Here is an implementation:

“NeatReceipts, which includes the NeatWorks for Mac 2.0 software, may well change all that.

NeatWorks is a combination scan and data capture program that lets you scan receipts, business cards, and other documents, automatically extract data from those documents, and then store that data in NeatWorks or export it to programs like Address Book, Quicken, Excel, or Numbers.”

It would be interested to see if Neatworks could be extended to process snippet of text lifted from a website or email.  On the shorter term, one could use NeatReceipts as the processing bin then pushed the data into S360 via API (for contact) or to Freshbook (for accounting). 

Actually, there is an app doing just that: Shoeboxed
http://www.shoeboxed.com/partners/

“Focus on Business, Not Paperwork!
Send in receipts and business cards using pre-paid envelopes, email, or your mobile phone, and Shoeboxed will scan, data enter, and organize them for you. You’ll enjoy new levels of productivity and never lose a deduction or contact again.”

Another cloud card-scanning app.

http://www.cloudcontacts.com/
“Let us scan, transcribe and connect your business cards on social networks, email services and CRM systems”
Two 1,000 pounds CRMs are listed… 

Shoeboxed seems more versatile, better for small businesses.

I’m using Penpower - I scan the card, save as VCF and then import VCF then shred the card, I have no business cards.

Any update on this?  I’ve been using the CardScan 800 for a few months now, and love it.  In addition to scanning business cards with amazing accuracy it also has a couple of other great features. 

1) You can drag a persons signature from an email (that into the application and it autofills the information into the correct fields and creates a new contact.

2) If you are processing a bunch of cards from a meeting or conference you can do a batch process, where you can add a common note to all the processed cards like “Met at XYZ conference June, 2010.”  You can also select a common category (or categories) for the group.

The software that they have syncs pretty seamlessly with Outlook, bringing over all the notes, categories, and even a picture of the card.  And any changes in one place are replicated over so fast that it feels like you are just using a single database.

Before I had this software I would fairly regularly devote most of a day to manually going through a big stack of cards that had been collected over the course of a trip.  Since I got this the amount of time I spend entering this information has been greatly reduced, which means I actually do it close to real time and tend to enter greater details in my notes since I remember more.

I know there are not really plans to build more direct syncing with Outlook, and that you can sync Outlook to Google to Solve360…but that involves a lot of steps, and I’m worried about data integrity.  It would be really nice to have a way to pull in directly either from this card scanning app, or from another app like some of the ones mentioned in this thread.  Just wanted to give a bit more color on what is out there and how I find it useful.  Hopefully S360 will be able to add in some kind of integration with these systems in the future.