If you have trouble keeping track of people you meet at conferences and other professional networking events, Evernote has the app for you. On Thursday, Evernote introduced the new version of its Hello iPhone app to help file information about the people you meet in a professional context.
I go to a lot of conferences and meet a lot of people, and I'm lousy at keeping track of their contact information. Back in the 20th century, if I had a vague memory of meeting this guy at a conference this one time, I would dig through stacks and stacks of business cards. Here in the 21st century… well, until recently, I still had those stacks and stacks of business cards.
Recently, I started snapping photos of new cards and saving those photos to Evernote. Evernote scans images for text and recognizes the text in those images, so if you search for a name in Evernote, and you have an image of that person's business card, Evernote will call up that image. That works well -- when I remember to snap a picture of the business card.
The new version of Evernote Hello, available free for the iPhone in the App Store, adds a few new ways to get those contacts into your digital record:
Snap a picture of a business card. Evernote doesn't just save the image; it also saves the name and contact information as text. And it imports profile information from LinkedIn and Facebook, if you've given Hello permission to access those services.
I tried this on a few business cards I had piled up in front of my computer keyboard from the last couple of conferences I attended. It worked great.
This method is available only to paid Evernote subscribers. A subscription is $5 per month or $45 per year. It's worth it.
Just enter the person's email address. Type it into Hello, and the app searches LinkedIn and Facebook for the person. That didn't work when I tried it. Perhaps the people didn't have their email addresses associated with their LinkedIn and Facebook accounts and publicly searchable.
You can also ask the people you meet to type in their contact information, which is the only way previous versions of Evernote Hello had of collecting information. I never liked that -- it seemed rude to hand other people your iPhone and ask them to type their information. Plus, it got other people's icky DNA all over your phone.
Use Hello Connect. If both you and the people you want to meet are using Evernote Hello, you can just activate the app simultaneously and press a button. The iPhones emit a tone. The Hello apps hear the tone and automatically collect contact information from each other. That's cool. I'm looking forward to trying it out.
Using any of these methods, Evernote Hello connects pictures of the people you meet with their profiles, either by pulling in those pictures from Facebook or LinkedIn (this is my Facebook profile pic -- if Evernote Hello gets very popular, I might need to change that) or by using a photo you snap on the spot. You can add notes to Evernote Hello about when and where you met your contacts.
All in all, Evernote Hello looks like a great upgrade. With the help of this app, if I've met you before, there's some chance I'll remember you the next time we meet.
jabailo - I'm fairly luddite when it comes to payment technology. It's not that I'm against NFC and payment by apps, it's just that I haven't gotten around to figuring out how to use them.
I'm well on my way to being the 2030s equivalent of the old person who holds up the whole line at the grocery store because they insist on writing a check.
I've experienced the same reactions when I've used Google Wallet. Assuming the POS terminal works, the cashiers and other customers sometimes stare in amazement and ask what I did.
I'm not a big coffee drinker and I'm not a fan of Starbucks roasts, but I'm surprised that Starbucks can't look up a loyalty card based on one's phone number. That really is primitive.
By the way, for loyalty cards, credit cards and other numbers, I store them in BlackBerry's Password Keeper app which uses AES encryption, so I have the information if I haven't taken the appropriate card.
I like Evernote, but I really do look towards the future and think today's contacts software is quite primitive compared to what it should be able to accomplish. Of course, you could say that about many things, including me!
For example, I was just at Starbucks. I didn't have my Rewards card (which gives me points everytime I buy there) so I asked the counter person if she could look it up by phone number. No she said, eventhough she has a state of the art IBM Pos workstation! I quipped that every local supermarket can do that.
Another one is the Near Field Readers on credit card swipers. It's like this lost technology they installed in some places and forgot about. For example, I went into RiteAid and used one, and the cashier was shocked. "How'd you do that!?" so I explained it to her. In general, using it produces awe, like using a magic wand. Many times the NFR is there but broken or disconnected.
BTW, the Evernote Hello app isn't so you can identify people when you meet them again. It's basically an address book app; it's designed to let you get in touch with people later.
I seem to remember reading a science fiction novel years ago where people walked around with various colored shapes above their heads that indicated their emotional state. No Internet or social networking profiles, though, so it's not sufficiently data-dense.
I want life to be like Second Life, where everybody walks around with their name floating above their head. You right-click on their avatar, it calls up their profile.
Supposedly if you use a person's name frequently, you're more likely to remember it, jabailo. I'm not sure if that actually works, jabailo. I've never tried it, jabailo.
The iPhone has an app called "Bump" that lets you exchange contact information by tapping phones together. I've never really used it.
In some techie circles, business cards are obsolete. You just Google the people you want to contact, or look them up on Twitter.
Yes. Mixing Facebook and business raises larger issues. People let their hair down on Facebook, but people often don't want to do business with hair-let-down people.
One of my favorite people on social media has a real potty-mouth, and frequently uses crazy profile photos on Twitter. But her LinkedIn profile is very professional, as is her profile photo there, where she's wearing a suit and is made up and ready for business.
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