This is some very cool news. Cool because my first real web and design job in college was working for one of the investors of CardMunch, Manu Kumar (@manukumar). In 1998 Manu was running a startup in Pittsburgh near the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) campus. It was a startup in every sense of the word from working on a folding table to Manu doing online teaching in order to cover the costs of his business called SneakerLabs, Inc. At that time we were working on a web-based collaboration service called iMeet. When I graduated from CMU in May 1999 I also decided to leave Pittsburgh and SneakerLabs even though Manu had offered me a full-time position. In March 2000 SneakerLabs was acquired by E.piphany and iMeet was spun off into its own company. In August 2002, iMeet, Inc. merged with Netspoke. In hindsight maybe I should have stuck around.

Today, Manu is the founder of K9 Ventures, an "early stage" venture fund that provides funding and support for concept-stage and seed-stage technology companies. Yesterday Manu helped launch CardMunch, an iPhone app that lets you take a snapshot of a business card and have it added to your iPhone contacts. The application is $2.99 and comes with 10 credits (it costs one credit per card entered). Beyond that, it costs around 25 cents per card. The interesting thing about CardMunch is that it actually has humans verify every card that's submitted through their system. Each photo that's uploaded is converted by hand via Mechanical Turk, not through optical character recognition (OCR).

It's great to see Manu continue to do great things 12 years later. Working at SneakerLabs on iMeet got me very interested in website design and development and I'm grateful that I had that opportunity such early on. It gave me a lot of confidence later on in life to design and develop my own ideas; Tasty CMS probably wouldn't be here today if I hadn't spent so much time at a startup.

CardMunch also has a free version if you want to check out the service which I would encourage you to do.