LinkedIn has ditched its CardMunch business card scanning app and has agreed to use Evernote’s app instead. Evernote’s app service was made available for the iOS app last year and would arrive on Android devices soon, the company said.
“I call bullshit on business cards going away. There’s no reason for them to go away, I think we’ve actually made them more useful,” said Phil Libin, CEO at Evernote.
LinkedIn and Evernote’s partnership grabbed profile information and gave users the option to connect to their new contact on LinkedIn, save the information on the smartphone or share details.
Evernote’s 90 million users received a year of free scanning in exchange for linking their Evernote accounts to LinkedIn to use the scanning service, which was previously available to paying customers only. The scan automated optical character recognition to pull out names, titles and phone numbers and organised the information inside users’ notes.
It was expected that more collaborations would follow. “The companies are really very compatible. You can combine them in a lot of different ways,” Libin said.
CardMunch users would receive two years of free business card-scanning through Evernote and could migrate their contacts into LinkedIn before the service shut down on July 11. The app was free and scanned business cards quickly and accurately but only pulled in 45,000 cards a day to LinkedIn’s 300 million member base.