Streamline contacts with a business card app for free!
People have been predicting the end of the business card for years.
Countless start-ups have popped up promising to make carrying more than one card, or any at all, obsolete. However tackling the business issue of contact management and business cards is not an easy job, and for all the countless startups that have appeared, a replacement solution still has not been found. As it stands, thousands of business cards are still exchanged daily, and they are a valuable resource, if leveraged properly. In short, business cards are not going anywhere.
Sansan, a Japanese company, seeks to solve this problem and truly take advantage of business cards with its smartphone and PC app. Sansan raised May 2014 $14 million to break into the US market. The app is made specifically for businesses, and lets users take photos of cards, upload them to the cloud, and have them transcribed digitally, and searchable. By scanning cards, and having colleagues do the same, Sansan creates a sharable, searchable contact database for teams and companies.
Need to track your own contacts and capture leads? Or how about use your colleagues connections for new leads or introductions? Sansan makes all of this possible.
The company currently has over 2,000 premium corporate customers in Japan, and an overwhelming market share nearing 80% in Japan in business card management services. Now it is rolling out its new service for the global market.
For high-volume jobs, clients can rent out scanners from Sansan. The software allows people to share their business-card contacts with colleagues. It is a more efficient way to keep everyone’s business contacts in the cloud and easily accessible.
Another differentiator is that, unlike most of similar services, Sansan doesn’t rely on machines to transcribe the cards. Instead, humans do it; Sansan uses a mix of OCR and human input including outsourcing or crowdsourcing to get through 4 million cards a month.
To avoid errors, two separate people have to transcribe each card identically before it gets uploaded. Because of this, Sansan has an almost 100% accuracy in transcribing information on the business card, which is a defining characteristic for Sansan to be the top choice to manage your business card.
