LinkedIn partners with Evernote to scan business cards, will shut down its CardMunch app
Evernote + LinkedIn: Powering Professional Relationships — Business cards are one of the many ways people initiate professional relationships, so it is important to us that our members can quickly …
Context & Ripple Effects
LinkedIn launched CardMunch in late 2011 as its own take on reinventing business cards, and the partnership announced today ends that in-house experiment: scanning moves to Evernote, and CardMunch itself is confirmed for shutdown. It is also the second time LinkedIn has retired a peripheral app rather than maintain it — after closing its Events app in 2012 and leaving Lanyrd to fill the gap ([[a:1198364]]).
For Evernote, the deal lands mid-turnaround. In January 2014 the company faced public complaints about software quality from longtime users, and its CEO responded with a promise of improved stability and simplicity for the year; the LinkedIn integration follows the September 2013 3M partnership that digitized Post-it notes into the product. A February 2014 Secret post claiming an Evernote acquisition was in play spread widely but remains unconfirmed — this partnership is a commercial tie-up, not a deal.
First-order effects
- CardMunch users lose their standalone scanning workflow and are pointed at Evernote's app, where LinkedIn-powered card recognition now lives.
- Evernote gains LinkedIn's identity graph for card-to-contact conversion, deepening a channel it had already opened with the 3M Post-it integration.
Second-order effects
- Dedicated card-scanning apps lose a high-profile incumbent competitor overnight, inheriting CardMunch users who want a single-purpose tool rather than a note repository.
- LinkedIn trades ownership of the capture moment for data flowing back into member profiles — betting that contact enrichment, not the scan itself, is where its value sits.
Third-order effects
- The pattern is now repeated twice at LinkedIn: single-utility apps get sunset and their jobs delegated to partners or the community, signaling a platform that consolidates mobile effort on its core graph and treats peripheral workflows as someone else's product surface.
- For Evernote, stacking physical-world capture partnerships (Post-it notes, business cards) positions it as a professional memory layer between offline encounters and digital records — a strategy whose durability depends on whether the 2014 quality commitments hold.
The trend: Large social platforms are shedding single-purpose companion apps in favor of partner integrations, keeping the network's data gravity while letting specialists own the edge tools.