CloudContacts Blog

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.

Sean Percival has written about his experience using our business card scanning and transcription service. Sean is an active member of the Los Angeles tech community and currently works with MySpace and Mobile Roadie. He also blogs with his wife about the LA tech scene on Lalawag.

In his review of CloudContacts, Sean talks about how he turned his business card contacts into “friends”. I put friends in quotes because Sean notes, “No I’m not talking about turning those stacks of business cards into real life “let’s go to the park and play catch” friends…. I’m talking about taking all those business cards you collect at conferences and mixers and turning them into new friends and followers across social media sites.”

Thanks to Sean for the great review. So what are you waiting for? Get your cards to us today!

Until just a few hours ago, all of the business cards we’ve processed have been sent to us on the ground. Today one of our awesome customers sent in a card via our email upload service from an airplane up in the air! Pretty darn neat if you ask me. He noted that he was at 50,000 feet when he sent the card although I think only the Concorde ever went up that high. Perhaps the map navigation was off due to all of the recent issues.

Since we’ve got land and air, we need business cards while on a boat/ship, train and perhaps one from the moon! Keep ‘em coming!

Welcome to 2010! While many of us were throwing confetti in the air, sipping champagne, kissing our significant others, our package carriers were updating their rate tables!

This morning the postal clerks at the Post Office were advising customers to note that rates went up as of today. If you ship packages via Priority Mail or Express Mail, check the updated rate table to see what rates went up. Looks like rates went up $0.80-$1.50 on average. Stamps remain at $0.44 for now but will go up later this year.

UPS has raised rates on ground 4.9% and air packages rates 6.9%. Checkout the UPS updated 2010 rate information for more details. All of the assorted fees have also increased for 2010.

FedEx has raised all of their rates as well. FedEx express rates have gone up 5.9% and ground rates up 4.9%. All of their fees and surcharges have increased as well.

Check out our shipping tips to save money on your shipping. Whether you are sending your business cards to us for processing or are shipping packages anywhere in the world, make sure you are always paying the least while getting the most bang for your buck.

One of the most popular features we added to CloudContacts this year has been the ability to categorize your business card contacts. Many of our awesome customers send in their contacts in categorized bundles which allows us to add the cards to the categories as we process them. Of course you can always add the contacts to categories at any time which helps for future interactions with the contact.

I’m excited to announce we’ve added a new download option today that will allow you to download only a selected category. The “download by category” option is available on the left menu and will display all of the categories that are available inside your CloudContacts account. The selected category is included in the download which makes it easy for category importing into other services including Gmail and Salesforce.

When collecting business cards from events and other networking, you should always bundle them in categories. Even if you don’t use CloudContacts to manage your cards (we hope you do!), it will help you identify where you originally met a contact later on. Just a simple band or envelope with a notation (e.g. “SXSW”, “NYC December 2009″ or “friends of Mike’s”) will work. It’s much easier to do it from the start than attempt to remember later on.