This is a quick post based on my experience using CloudContacts. I first heard about CloudContacts a few weeks ago and was intrigued. In a nutshell, I think of CloudContacts as a business card scanner as a service (as opposed to business card scanning as a product offered by CardScan). The process for getting your cards into CloudContacts is pretty straightforward:

-Put 700 business cards in a large plastic bag
-Put said plastic bag in a FedEx or USPS envelope and mail it off to them
-Pay $181.20 for the privilege of having my business cards digitized and make available for easy import into many systems. That broke down to about 25 cents per card scanned.
-Wait a few days until you get an email telling you the digitized file with your cards is available

CloudContacts was a fair deal – not cheap, but a good value
I could have bought a new card scanner for about $200. Instead, I chose to use CloudContacts. I’ve used card scanners in the past and I found that about 80% of the cards I scanned came in 100% correct. For data purity reasons, I often had to manually review all of the cards I scanned. I’m not sure whether paying $0.25 per card was the right price, but it struck me as relatively fair and conformed to my own Kinko’s principle (the Charles Hudson Kinko’s principle states that I’m willing to pay a premium for stuff I don’t want to own but do want to use from time to time; I expect to pay a premium for scanning, printing, faxing, etc but don’t expect to get gouged).

The results CloudContacts produced were MUCH better than what I was able to create by manually scanning cards by hand. I’ve been flipping through the results I got back from CloudContacts and so far I have yet to find a meaningful data error in the 700 cards they sent my way. They also gave me a wide variety of file formats to choose as well – I opted for Highrise and the import was flawless.

Good customer service along the way – As an aside, I had a bunch of questions during the process and Allen from CloudContacts provided timely updates and answers to my questions. I found it very reassuring.

I am pretty pleased with my first experience with CloudContacts. It strikes me as a good business that charges a fair price for a good product.

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