Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you this fine day.
Me?
I’m feeling particularly well-connected and thank you so much for asking.
Why is it I’m feeling so well-connected, you might well ask?
I’m glad you did because I would like to tell you.
It’s because two of my favorite products: Evernote and LinkedIn have gotten together
to help me and you with our business card situation.
Now Evernote has been developing business card scanning technology and building it into
Evernote without really—it’s been kind of just sitting there on its own and we haven’t
used it too much up to now.
LinkedIn has had a program called CardMunch which is quite popular although I never really
dug CardMunch all that much.
It turns out that LinkedIn is now dumping CardMunch in favor of a new relationship with
Evernote which just might be a thing of beauty so stick around.
You’re going to want to find out what EverIn or LinkedNote has to offer.
All right, Evernote has long been a favorite app of mine and lately Evernote has been really
taking advantage of their document capturing capabilities of their Evernote camera to give
us some really creative new functionality.
Case in point: In the last couple of months, we have taken a look at the Evernote’s ability
to capture post it notes and to automatically file them, and to work with the Moleskine
notebook to digitize notes and automatically file those as well by using little stickers
that we place on them.
We do all that through the camera app that’s built in to Evernote.
Now LinkedIn and Evernote are getting together to give us yet more functionality to that
camera.
Let me show you where we go.
Let me first of all fire up and start to share this Macbook.
Let me first of all fire up and start sharing my iPhone here to give you a look-see.
Now everything I’m doing right now we can do on the iPhone right now, not all of it
in Android although you will be able to do this very shortly in Android.
They are committed to making it work on Android as well.
But here’s the start.
You go in to your Evernote settings.
You go into the gear settings.
We’ve done this a few times now.
You go into the General tab and here on the General tab if we scroll down we can see the
camera.
In the Camera Settings, we can go and we can maintain our settings and we can set it up
to capture Post-it notes and the Moleskine Notebook, all things that we’ve already
looked at and are awesome with Evernote.
But there’s this new and this additional one here called Business Cards and if we tap
on the Business Card link, we can go in and we can connect our Evernote account to our
LinkedIn account.
Then if we have our saving contact info to Contacts, we’re saving it in the Contact
form so it’s like in the database form then we have the ability to link and to synch our
Evernote Contacts with our LinkedIn Contacts so we can then automatically move everything
over into LinkedIn, which creates all sorts of new opportunities for us.
It is awesome.
Now also in here we have the ability to choose what notebook all of our business cards are
saved to.
So I just created a notebook called Notebooks and if you want to you can tag the notes as
well.
You can set this up temporarily.
So if you are at a conference and you are gathering a whole bunch of business cards
at the conference, you can set up a tag to automatically tag everything from that one
conference as it comes in and then change the tag when you move to the next conference.
So you have that kind of control at this point using these tools.
They’re quite flexible and quite powerful.
But now let’s take a look at the actual scanning because bottom line is if it’s
not easy to capture the business card and if it’s not clear, if it doesn’t do a
good job of digitizing and parsing out the information, it’s really not that much of
a solution, is it?
So to use it, we go into the camera.
When we go into the camera, we have within our camera we have the ability to save post
it notes, which we’ve looked at, photos, documents using it as the documents scanner
and now this new business card one.
Now the cool thing with the business card one is it will look for the business card.
It actually creates a little frame for us so all we have to do it’s basically get
the business card within that frame and go bink.
It will automatically find it and then it takes a picture.
You don’t even have to hold it straight.
You see how I had it at a slight angle there?
But it nevertheless gets it through and with a business card like this which is almost
all text, look at what a great job it does at parsing out all of the information and
look what it’s done already.
Because it’s linked with LinkedIn, it’s gone into LinkedIn and it’s pulled the photo
of the contact that I have.
It’s awesome!
It’s just awesome how that works!
But let’s see how it works on maybe a little bit more challenging business card.
So here’s another card that I have, one that I got to say okay that.
What you have to see here is what it does is—actually I’m not connected to this
person on LinkedIn; it just pulled the information—it allows us to do a few things at this point
here.
You can email your contact information to the person right away.
So think about being at that conference.
Somebody gives you their business card, you scan it in and now just with one tap your
email and all of your contact information can be mailed to them so they don’t have
to scan in your business card so the connection is made.
You can also invite them to connect on LinkedIn, if you want to create that connection right
away at whatever venue you happen to be at as well.
So this is really a streamlined process now for bringing people together, for connecting.
Now let’s try another card and this one here is a little more complex.
Let’s see how it does.
Now you notice what’s happening here.
We’re just going to move it in and once it capture it like grabs it, it’s pretty
easy.
This one’s more challenging.
There’s a lot more information on it.
The name of the person is not quite as clear so it missed the company name, which is okay.
No, it didn’t the company name.
It pulled a different piece of text for the company name but it got most of the information.
It looks fairly correct.
The thing that’s important here is you do have to go through in Evernote a little bit
later on and you do have to audit.
You have to go through and read through and make sure that everything is correct because
it will make the odd little mistake.
It will turn an I into a 1 and that sort of stuff as it’s parsing out the information
so you have to proofread each card.
But the cool thing is you’ll see when we go into Evernote in a moment that the card,
the image of the card, is there for us as well.
So let’s try a really challenging card.
Sorry, I said done.
Let me go back into the camera and let’s start it again while it’s synching that.
Let’s take a much more difficult one now.
Let’s take this card here and I want to show you what’s going to happen.
This is a very graphically rich card that is quite popular, the style should I say is
becoming increasingly popular and look, it’s not just getting it at all.
It can’t capture it.
Now one of the problems is it’s a dark background with a dark card.
So they tell us to, whenever possible, use a light colored background with a light dark
card and a dark-colored background with a light-colored card.
So here we go.
Now it’s capturing the information.
It didn’t really.
It cut things off so I’m going to actually ask it to do it again.
I’m going to trash that one.
I’m not going to let it use that one and I’m going to try it again, maybe working
a little bit better angle.
There we go.
If there’s glare on it, you tilt the camera slightly and that gets rid of the glare.
Okay, so it captured the card here and it didn’t do too bad a job capturing it.
Let’s see if it gets anything out of it at all.
With a card like this, it’s not going to get a lot of information and there’s just
nothing that we can do about that.
Really graphically rich cards are going to be very, very difficult for it to save.
So it’s just something we’re going to have to put up with.
But here’s the next step of that process even when you do have that.
So bottom line is if it’s an easy card to scan in, if it’s an easy card, it’s black
and white text, it’s going to do a great job of capturing the information and putting
it into the correct fields.
If it’s something that’s graphically rich like that, the one that we just saw, well
then we’re going to have to take on a little bit of responsibility ourselves.
But still it’s a step way in the right direction.
So here’s my business card notebook right here.
So let’s just take a look at the three cards that were imported.
I don’t have to pick up the card to proofread anymore because I’ve got the card right
here so I can proofread here just by looking at this information here.
That one is in great shape.
This one here, what I might do is I might go in and I might change the company to Speak
Your Purpose, which is the name of her company and I would make the editing here.
I can go Speak Your Purpose.
I can make all of those changes right here because it’s dealing with it as a contact
within Evernote.
Then finally this card here, really no useful information at all but I can read it and I
can just go through it.
I can type in the information here should I choose to.
So this one here even though it’s still some manual entry, at last again I don’t
have to go looking for the card and look back and forth.
I can see it all right here on the screen.
Now what will happen because we synched this with LinkedIn is all of these contacts will
be passed over into LinkedIn as well and they’ll be available to us within LinkedIn, within
the contact area of LinkedIn.
That’s what I want to show you just quickly right now, the Contact area within LinkedIn.
To see your contact in LinkedIn, you go into your LinkedIn account, you go under the Network
Settings, you go into Contacts here and that brings you into your LinkedIn Contacts.
They’ll give you all sorts of background information on all the different people that
you’re connected with here on LinkedIn.
But where you want to check on this synch, on how it’s talking to other applications,
is by clicking here on Settings and within Settings then we can go and we can set up
the relationships with the other apps.
So I’ve got it set up to actually synch with my Google Contacts, which I think should
be another demo.
We should be talking about how that all works at another time.
Here we also have it synched with Evernote.
So there we have what could be the beginning of a really beautiful relationship between
LinkedIn and Evernote for us.
I think that’s awesome and I should point out that more than just the contacts are going
to synch into LinkedIn.
All of your notes within Evernote are also going to be available to you.
You will be able to call them up when you’re in and you’re communicating within LinkedIn.
So it’s going to change our work flow quite a bit, at least those of us who decide to
embrace this new metaphor.
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And with that, I am out of here.
I am Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle!