CloudContacts Blog

Yesterday Google announced the launch of Google Buzz. If you haven’t yet heard of the new service, check out an in-depth overview from Louis Gray. The basic idea of the Google Buzz service is to aggregate all of your “social” content together with other content from  your friends into one big river of social content. Google Buzz actually operates inside of Gmail and the service will rollout over the next few days. You will know you have access when you see a Buzz link on the left menu inside of your Gmail account.

The biggest key to using Google Buzz effectively is to make sure your contacts are inside of your Google account. And getting your business card contacts into your Google/Gmail account is super quick and easy when you use CloudContacts.

Once we scan and transcribe your business cards, you can select to send your contacts to Gmail which takes about one minute to do. From there you can “activate” your business card contacts in Google Buzz. What’s even better is that we can categorize your contacts inside CloudContacts and the categories will transfer as well into Gmail. This way you can decide who or which categories will get access to your Google Buzz stream.

So what will you Buzz about?

Next weekend is Valentine’s Day. It’s always easy to tell when this special day is on the way because of all the chocolate and flowers that starts to appear in markets around the world. Oh yea, and all the love in the air. And we hear that business card scanning and transcription services are also very popular this time of the year.

We here at CloudContacts are totally in love with our customers and want to share a very special and sweet offer for everyone to enjoy. You can grab a special discount using the code below and get a sweet gift sent to your sweetie (the sweetie can be anyone). Here’s how it works:

1. Place an order and enter the code ”vcard” in the shopping cart coupon box – you will receive a 5% discount on your total purchase
2. When we confirm your CloudContacts account, we will ask you for your sweetie’s address.
3. You provide the address and we will ship a bundle of sweets to your sweetie.

Think about how wonderful this deal is – by you getting your business cards organized, you will have more time to spend with your sweetie on this special day! Act now, like chocolate this deal expires on February 14.

(note, you may choose to have the sweets mailed to yourself if you prefer)

There really is nothing better than receiving awesome customer feedback. Today I read the following comment from one of our customers who blogs at Peninsulawyer. Here are a couple of exerpts from his comment:

“You do have to pay for CloudContacts, but it is an absolutely awesome service for business cards – snap a photo on your iPhone and email it and all the information is transcribed and uploaded to your CloudContacts page – and can also be downloaded to Outlook.”

“I don’t know how the transcription is done, but it always seems to be perfect, which is more that I can say for other card readers I have tried. I’m not getting paid by them to say this (unfortunately!) – just think it is a great service.”

Thanks to Jon for the great feedback and for being one of our CloudContacts customers!

We are currently looking to fill a few open positions here at CloudContacts:

• PHP developer – part-time position (may move to full-time) – intermediate-to-senior level, preferably located in NYC but open to remote work, knowledge of MySQL required, knowledge of Google Maps and APIs preferred

Also have a couple fun intern positions open (these positions are three-months in duration and unpaid although you can have as many Twix as you like):

• Sales and Marketing intern – community management, idea generation, outreach – you must have excellent written and verbal skills
• Developer intern – work with team developer to maintain and enhance service

Oh yea, you must love business cards and be willing to have conversations with them at any time! Don’t worry, the cards don’t talk back – at least not yet!

If you are interested in any of the above positions, contact us. Include something interesting regarding business cards.

I am super excited to announce the public launch of our enterprise plans. As we’ve processed more cards, we started to notice a need for plans that allowed for team-oriented features and larger business card scanning and transcription counts. We’ve been running our enterprise plans in private beta over the last couple of months and are now ready to share the plans publicly.

The enterprise plans receive all of the benefits that our individual plans do including our top-notch customer support.

Additional benefits of our enterprise plans:

• Priority processing
• Credits can be split into multiple sub-accounts as needed
• Custom exports can be created for enterprise system integration
• Multiple card pickups each month (currently available in NYC)
• Multiple shipments per month
• Option to receive card images and data on CD or DVD

Enterprise plans start at 1,000 credits (1 credit = 1 card) and can be scaled to meet your team’s needs.

As always, please contact us with any questions about our business card scanning and transcription solution.