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Sick of keeping track of contact details? ContactMonkey wants to help

Jessica Stillman — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 13:01:53 +0000

Business cards, the L.A. Times, recently reported, are rapidly going out of fashion. But as paper rectangles become passé (and people communicate in more ways, moving more often between gigs), the question of how best to share, store and update contact details becomes more complicated. How do I get everything from my office address to my Twitter handle into your Outlook address book, gmail contacts or BlackBerry?

Various apps like Bump and CardMunch are available for certain platforms, but for many the answer is still cutting and pasting information out of email signatures into various digital address books and updating it manually when friends or colleagues send out the, ‘hey, I got a new number!’ email. ContactMonkey aims to offer a better way.

The Toronto, Canada-based company was started by Scott Pielsticker last year after he returned from a trade show with hundreds of business cards and faced the time consuming task of updating his address book. His solution was ContactMonkey, a sort of cloud-based online business card (here’s Pielsticker’s as an example) you complete with your details and then share with contacts as a URL or QR code. Associates can then easily download all your details to any of 19 kinds of address book with the option to receive a notification whenever your details are updated.

The service is free to individuals, while companies are charged $3 per user per month for “white label” ContactMonkey pages, which feature a firm’s branding. Users can also receive notifications detailing exactly who has downloaded their details, a feature that seems likely to appeal to anyone interested in lead generation. So far 10,000 people are using the service, with particular interest from sales-focused professional services firms like lawyers and real estate agents. The company also just received $800,000 in seed funding from Plazacorp Ventures and angel investors, which it intends to use to ramp up its sales operation.

“The basic idea is very, very simple,” says Pielsticker, boiling down his product to its essence. “Most business people have an email signature and the premise behind that is we want people to be able to communicate with us. ContactMonkey makes it easy for them to actually grab those details. I don’t care if you’re using Outlook, a Blackberry or an iPhone. I want you to have my details irrespective of what device you’re using.”

While many digital natives may be content to search their email for a contact’s details and experience no difficulty keeping in touch with their networks, ContactMonkey seems like a painless, platform-agnostic solution for those who are frustrated by incomplete and out-of-date address books. If that’s you or your clients, check out the service.

Are you frustrated with keeping your address book up to date or are you pretty content an ad hoc system?

Image courtesy of ContactMonkey.

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LinkedIn biz card iPhone app CardMunch gets makeover

Colleen Taylor — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 13:30:13 +0000

Back in January 2011, LinkedIn acquired a startup called CardMunch, a very handy iPhone app which scanned, transcribed and organized business card information. On Tuesday, the company is set to announce a relaunch of the CardMunch iPhone app with a new look and feel.

Over the past several months, LinkedIn says it has rebuilt CardMunch from the ground up to tie it in more wholly with the professional social network. Now, once a person’s business cards are scanned, the CardMunch app will map that information and tie it to his or her LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn puts it this way: “Now you know the person behind the card — the who, what, where and when for every business card you scan.” Indeed, the new app could make first impressions more well-informed than ever.

The company says the rehaul has also made the app simpler and quicker to use. Its user experience now is composed of just three screens: card capture, contact list, contact details and LinkedIn profiles.

CardMunch has always been a cool app, and it made lots of sense as an acquisition for LinkedIn. In addition, LinkedIn says its mobile page views have grown 400 percent year-over-year, so mobile is a hugely strategic place for the company going forward. The new upgrades seem solid, but people can be quite touchy about apps they love, especially ones they use professionally, so it will be interesting to see how people react to the CardMunch facelift.

Here are a couple of screenshots of the new CardMunch for iPhone (click to enlarge):

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As Angel Investing Booms, So Does the AngelList

Om Malik — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 06:00:28 +0000

Naval Ravikant, a serial entrepreneur, and Babak Nivi, a rebel venture capitalist, have been active angel investors for a long time. In February last year they decided that perhaps it would make sense to start an email list that would match startups looking for funding to wealthy investors — angels, as they are known in Silicon Valley parlance. So they started AngelList.

It is one of the more disruptive startup funding ideas to come to market. Thus far, the idea of angel investing has been constrained by the who-you-know factor. If you know the right people, and if you get the right introductions, then your chances of getting funded are much higher.

AngelList says to hell with that. Instead, they are creating a marketplace that allows the buyers (angels) and sellers (startups) to come together. It is a model that has been successful — so far AngelList has helped 200 startups raise money, Ravikant says. And even the size of the total investment dollars in each start-up is starting to become substantial enough to rival what has been a typical Series-A funding.

Up next: an index-fund approach to angel and seed investments. Naval says that most entrepreneurs want a specialist VC, mostly because they have connections and domain knowledge. AngelList will list the areas of expertise of angel investors, including the market they prefer to focus on. So if you are a startup chasing opportunities in the e-commerce sector, you can offer your business plan to angels who prefer e-commerce companies over, say, social games.

AngelList has benefitted handsomely from the exuberance around angel investing, and its growth mirrors increase in investor interest in Internet-related companies. It is not clear how investments in hundreds of startups, many of them chasing at best long-shot opportunities in the Consumer Internet sector, are going to pay off.

These are indeed scary times. Some blame AngelList for causing this angel feeding frenzy. I disagree. AngelList is nothing but a tool in the hands of angel investors. What it has done is remove the friction in the process of raising money. It has also helped angels look at more deals very quickly and process them even faster. The lack of due diligence, however, is what can upset the apple cart.

AngelList has come at a time when a lot of successful entrepreneurs have enough dollars in their bank accounts for them to take small fliers on other startups, all in the hope that one of them would turn out to be a Twitter, or in some cases the next best thing — a startup Twitter or Facebook wants to buy.

I don’t expect this frenzy to slow down anytime soon. The more we see big-dollar investments in companies like Facebook, Twitter and Groupon, the more we will see angels pumping dollars into startups, viable or not.

App of the day: CardMunch

If you get a lot of business cards, you have two options to get the information into your digital Rolodex: manually type the information or scan the cards. Now there is an app for that. CardMunch, an iPhone app that allows you to take a photo of a business card, uploads them to a server where the card gets transcribed and is sent to your address book and to your LinkedIn account. It is a very simple app, and a joy to use. LinkedIn liked the app so much that they bought it and made it free.

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