LinkedIn announced today plans to shut down its business card scanning app CardMunch in favor of a new partnership with Evernote which offers a competing service. In its initial reasoning for the new approach, LinkedIn points to the more advanced feature set of Evernote’s offering:
In transitioning from CardMunch to Evernote, LinkedIn is offering its users who transfer their CardMunch data to Evernote two free years of premium business card scanning. LinkedIn users who did not previously use CardMunch will still get access to Evernote’s business card scanning feature but for just one year for free.
Evernote’s card scanning service is fast, reliable, and literally world-class, with support for seven languages.
In Evernote, our members will be able to view profile photos, job titles and company information from LinkedIn right in the notes created when they scan business cards. LinkedIn members will now also be able to enter comments related to the scanned card and geo-tag the location where the card was scanned.
Alternatively, LinkedIn is allowing CardMunch users not interested in giving Evernote their data the ability to export and download their information captured with its discontinued service. LinkedIn will pull support for CardMunch on July 11, 2014.
LinkedIn purchased CardMunch in early 2011 as it notes in today’s announcement, but Evernote has developed as more robust version of the same feature CardMunch offered. As we’ve seen with previous services like Intro being shut down, LinkedIn is continuing to narrow its portfolio and instead rely on partnerships (and networking!) with other companies for delivering better features rather than going at it alone. Evernote added business card scanning to its mobile software for premium subscribers at the end of last year.
