LinkedIn offers free app to scan business cards

New CardMunch app makes digitizing business cards, connecting on LinkedIn free and fast

Keeping and organizing business cards is hard. We live in a digital society where everything lives on our phones and there is no place for these paper rectangles or octagons or rulers (or whatever trendy design people have chosen to make them stand out.)

And the big name in business connections and networking, LinkedIn, finally announced Tuesday the launch of the company's CardMunch iPhone app.

Back in January, LinkedIn (NYSE: LNKD) bought a startup called CardMunch for an undisclosed amount. It was a service that could scan business cards and store them in your phone.

LinkedIn announced that the CardMunch app has already digitized millions of business cards and, with the new integration and changes to the app, will now connect that information with the correlating LinkedIn profiles.

How it works

Once the new app is downloaded on an iPhone, the user has just three easy fields to deal with -- Capture, Contact, and LinkedIn.

After you have lined up the card in the viewfinder and taken a picture, the card is scanned and the software turns it into a contact that can be saved in your contact list, then you can choose to connect this information to your LinkedIn profile.

Past versions of the app only showed you the information scanned from the business card, this version will find the correlating person on LinkedIn and combine the card information with their profile, photos of contacts, common connections, past work experience and education.

CardMunch was previously a paid app, the iOS app is now free for users to download, but to gain functionality you must be a LinkedIn user.

So far the app is only available for the iPhone.

LinkedIn has continued to grow in the mobile sphere this year, with new mobile applications and the company has see its mobile page views quadruple year-over-year. The social networking company is gaining a great deal of clout on the mobile front after many users responed favorably for the easy-to-use and visually appealing mobile application.

As of Tuesday morning, the LNKD stock opened at 76.19.

Image Sources -- Officesupplygeek.com