-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.

Features I Like

Creating Tasks and Contacts by Email – The ability to create new contacts and tasks via email is great. I like the fact that I can just forward emails to my dropbox and have the system create a new contact based on the contents of the email. There was one glitch, however — Highrise seemed to get confused by the fact that the address I use to log into Highrise is different than the address I use to send data into the system. This led to some erroneous information being associated with the wrong address. The ability to create tasks on the go, however, was very useful.

Task tagging – I like the ability to tag/classify tasks based on the type of task (phone call, email, follow-up, etc) – it’s a very handy way for me to see what tasks I need to do.

Contact annotation – I like the fact that I can add notes to existing contacts to keep track of previous conversations or other items that come up from folks with whom I interact.

Areas for Improvement

As much as I like the system as a first effort, there are a few features where I would love to see some improvement:

Recurring Tasks – I was really hoping that Highrise would allow me to use some form of recurring task. For example, there are some tasks and things I need to do every month, every quarter, etc. The simplicity of the current task list doesn’t really allow me to create the kind of recurring tasks I’d like to create.

Contact importer – I am still befuddled as to why the product doesn’t have a decent contact importer. Right now, my only options are to import a vCard or use the Basecamp importer. Most of my contacts live in Outlook and Gmail and there are lots of handy utilities for importing contacts from those services. Highrise would be a lot more useful to me if there were a faster way for me to populate the system with people and contacts I already maintain.

Annotate tasks with more information – The very simplicity of task creation in Highrise, which I think is great, is also kind of vexing. There are some tasks where I would like to be able to create a task and annotate that task with more information. For example, if I create a task to “Call Joe on Tuesday”, I’d like the ability to add some more detail, like his phone number, agenda, etc. This seems like a logical thing to want to do with a task.

Connect tasks with contacts – Many of the tasks that I create in Highrise pertain to people (follow up with Joe, call Jane, send a document to Jerry, etc). I wish there were a way to connect tasks with contacts. For example, Highrise has a great feature that allows me to treat a person essentially as a very basic CRM record — I can create notes and annotations from calls or via email to existing records I have created. However, I’d really like to be able to create tasks/to-dos and attach those to people. For example, it would be great to be able to look someone up in Highrise and see what I “owe them” in terms of follow-ups, tasks and action items.

Looking forward to additional features from the 37signals team.

Once I have played around with it for awhile I’ll pen a follow-up post.

Update: Since my riff about not having a power-user account, 37signals has gone ahead and made a new “Solo” account which sounds much closer to what I’d actually like. Now that’s what I call responsiveness!

After spending about a day using this service, I think it’s cool and I hope that other providers, namely Salesforce.com and SugarCRM, look at offering some of their core modules as things that a user could track in a personalized homepage, be it Google, NetVibes, Pageflakes, or whatever.

Also, as a user, one of the neat things that this made me realize is that being able to get a bundle of gadgets/widgets that all work really well together is very valuable — it’s a lot easier than trying to cobble together a handful of other gadgets and figuring out how/whether they can all work together.