As more and more people move their work to the cloud for productivity, companies like Box, Dropbox, and Evernote are rushing to win over enterprise users. Each of these companies knows that business users are more likely to spend more money than the average person, often because it is reimbursed by their employers.
LinkedIn – Evernote: First collaboration of many(?)
Evernote is looking to become more and more essential and will certainly welcome the first of many collaborations with professional social network LinkedIn Corp (NYSE:LNKD). “The companies are really very compatible. You can combine them in a lot of different ways,” said Evernote CEO Phil Libin who believes it’s a perfect combination of “who you know” and “what you know.”
The first collaboration between the two involves unveiling LinkedIn Corp (NYSE:LNKD)’s business card scanning to Evernote’s 90 million users. Free Evernote users will receive a years worth of business card scanning simply for linking their account to LinkedIn. Prior to the announcement, the scanning of business cards was only available to paying Evernote users. Using optical character recognition, simply take a photo of the business card and you will immediately be given a note. Additionally, the app will give you the option of connecting to the card/contact on LinkedIn and allow you to save the infomation to your phone or share your contact information.
See you later CardMunch
The partnership means that LinkedIn Corp (NYSE:LNKD) will shut down CardMunch which it acquired in 2011. The app was one of very few ways to scan business cards in a timely manner with a high degree of accuracy. However, it was almost as if LinkedIn forgot that it had purchased the app and left it to die on the vine. “We have some extremely passionate and loyal users of that application,” says Bob Rosin, vice president of business development at LinkedIn. “We knew they wanted more.”
It’s not as if LinkedIn neglected a major acquisition. The company paid only $2.4 million for the application that never really took off amongst the 300 million users of LinkedIn. Evernote’s app, unlike CardMunch which used contractors to check for accuracy, is completely automatic. CardMunch users will now get two years of free scanning with Evernote and will be encouraged to migrate their contracts.
While LinkedIn Corp (NYSE:LNKD) may feel that people just aren’t putting their business cards on the cloud. Though one person at Evernote, namely its CEO, disagrees, “I call bullshit on business cards going away — there’s no reason for them to go away,” he says. “And I think we’ve actually made them more useful.”
