CloudContacts Will Finally Help You Use Your Business Contacts Efficiently

CloudContacts is a new startup launched this week that works in the field of contacts management by taking your contacts to the cloud and helping you manage and access all of them from any place in the world – all of that without carrying piles of business cards with you everywhere or struggling with a card reader.

CloudContacts works by digitizing the cards customers submit to the team for a fee. After the cards are processed, you can access all your contacts from a web interface from anywhere. It is also possible to import all the contacts into quite a number of popular email applications, including Outlook, Entourage, Thunderbird and Exchange with further email clients to be added in the future by request.

An important part of the service is that it will help you easier connect to your business contacts on social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter. To me this seems like a very important functionality as after every conference I attend I sort out all my new contacts and invite them to join my LinkedIn network or follow them on Twitter.

Of course having the contact information on cards is better than not having them at all but finding someone you need to shoot an email or give a call can be painful. To the contrary, connecting on a social network makes it really easier to continue building relationships with the person you are connected to – and could potentially increase chances for joint projects. This is why I think that such a connection on social networks is one of the best things a startup could come up with – offering a one-click way to connect on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter is definitely something many networking-savvy business people will appreciate.

In addition to simplifying the process of managing your business contacts, CloudContacts has yet another purpose – the startup also intends to make the world a better and greener place by introducing an option to have business cards recycled after they are submitted and processed. The goal currently is to have a million cards recycled this year and I would really love to see report of the achieved goal on the CloudContacts blog within a year.

Pricing ranges from $30 to $99 depending on the number of business cards you want to have processed. The service is available in the US, Canada, Western Europe and UK. I believe the limitation is mainly due to the process of having the cards mailed from other countries where postal services can be far from reliable.

CloudContacts has been launched by Allen Stern from CenterNetworks and it is already visible that the service can hardly be criticized by the tech blogosphere as Allen has offered everything that we tend to want: a startup with a real-life value in it, a business model from the very beginning, and even something green on top of that. I guess if every blogger in the technology blogosphere could actually do some coding, we could see more interesting projects like CloudContacts launched and growing successful over time. And as someone with no coding skills myself, I guess I will continue admiring people like Allen and reviewing startups like CloudContacts – hopefully bringing new customers to the useful tools.