The paper business card may go away someday if innovative apps like Bump and Evernote Hello take over, but for now we're still dealing with these little chunks of cardboard. Of course, in almost all cases it's not the physical object we care about, but rather the data printed on the card. (Some exceptions are inevitable.) Getting those inky bits converted to actual bits is easy enough with your iPhone and the right app. My default tool for business card scanning has been CardMunch, which has a number of advantages: fast, ties in easily to parent company LinkedIn, accurate (using actual humans to do the card transcription) and free. Unfortunately, CardMunch's cloud dependency means that sometimes it can get backed up, and when you're sitting on an airplane with a stack of post-conference business cards to go through, it's quite likely useless. That's where the Penpower family of contact management apps Read More

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business. If you’ve ever returned from a business trip with a stack of business cards, you’ve no doubt wondered — as you’re manually typing in all those names, phone numbers and email addresses — if there’s a better way. It turns out there are lots of better ways. Too many, in fact, and that’s the problem. The lack of a standard means that a great solution like the Bump app will only work if the person you’re trying to link up with has the app, not to mention an iPhone or Android-based smartphone. You could, of course, use your phone’s camera to take a picture of the other person’s business card, but that would still require that he or she has a business card in the first place. Read More

It's January 6th, 2012, and today marks the end of the TUAW Best of 2011 awards. This was a massive undertaking, with 25 separate categories all requiring their own nominations and voting from our readers. We've learned some lessons for next year's event -- start earlier, watch for astroturfing in the nominations, drop some unpopular categories -- and the Best of 2012 will be even better. The editorial staff here at TUAW agreed with many of the reader picks, but we had our own opinions on some others. We want to thank all of the thousands of TUAW readers who took time to consider their favorite accessories and apps, nominate them for an award, and then vote in the competition. Without further ado, here's the full list of winners as well as our picks for the TUAW Best of 2011: Editor picks: 13" and 11" MacBook Air, 13" MacBook Pro Peripheral Read More

Some of you may remember CardMunch before LinkedIn acquired it earlier this year. The app lets you scan business cards and add them to a contact list. It uses Amazon's Mechanical Turk service and an actual human to do the optical character recognition needed to translate the image into text. Now that LinkedIn has been working with the developers for the past few months, an updated version complete with LinkedIn profile integration has been released. Besides its tie-in to LinkedIn, the updated app has a fresh, new UI and improved support for the iPhone's camera. It also lets you add notes to each business card so you can remember where and when you met this new contact. Best of all, the app, which used to cost US$2.99 and 25 cents per scanned business card, is now available for free. Read More