EContact Pro App – The Most Accurate, Secure Way to Transcribe Business Cards

How often have you collected business cards at parties and networking events, only to lose them later, or waste hours and hours manually transcribing the contact information into your mobile device? I am too embarrassed to answer that question. Enter EContact Pro, an App that does all this for you, for just 10 cents per card.

At the 1st ever App Pitch SF event here at pariSoma, I caught up with Julian Nachtigal, the Business Development Manager in the US for Econtract Pro. Julian was kind enough to spend a lot of time with me talking about the value that EContact Pro provides, how it has become quickly popular on the App Store, bagging a featured app coverage by Apple, what the Business Model for monetizing the App is and what’s in store for the App in the coming days…

What is EContact Pro?

Julian: EContact Pro is a business card reader that uses manual transcription instead of OCR. The OCR is scanning technology, which is supposed to recognize everything that’s on a business card, but we realize it’s not very accurate. It may be 70% correct at most and sometimes it doesn’t even recognize the card.

With EContact Pro, you take a picture of a card, it’s sent to a back office where people actually see the card, transcribe it and manually input it. It comes back and it’s stored in your app and it automatically syncs with your iPhone contacts too.

What category does it fall under?

Julian:It’s in the business category. Right now, it’s #2 in the Business category! It was recently featured by Apple. It’s been doing very, very well!

Is it just an iPhone app?

Julian:Right now, it’s an iPhone app. It’s going to be on BlackBerry and Android too by the end of the year. We realize BlackBerry especially is important, because it’s a really strong business tool for people. We know we have to be on other platforms and we’re working on that.

How long have you been on the App Store and how is the Reaction?

Julian:It’s been on the app store in France since the end of January and it’s been very good. It’s hit #1 several times in Business in France and it’s been featured in France.

We launched and have been in the US app store since the end of April. We got featured last week by Apple. We hit number #2 in business and it’s been received very well. It’s got a 4 Star rating in the app store.

How much does it cost?

Julian: Right now it’s on sale for 99 cents. Usually it costs $3.99 and that includes 10 credits, which are essentially 10 business cards. Then you have in-app purchases of business cards for 10, 100 and 500. 500 business cards costs 10 cents a card and is $50 for the pack of 500. We also do custom requests as well.

What’s the turnaround time for delivering the Transcribed Cards?

Julian: It’s overnight. Usually when you collect business cards, it’s at events or conferences where you’re collecting business cards all day — so you go home or start taking pictures of them during the day.

The next morning when you wake up, all the contacts have been transcribed. They’re in your app. They’re in your iPhone contacts. If your iPhone contacts sync with your address book on your MacBook, which is usually the case, or your iMac, they sync with those — if that syncs with your Gmail, then it syncs with your Gmail as well.

Why would I want to use this as opposed to an iPhone app like Bump or something else?

Julian: Bump is really interesting, because I get a lot of people who ask me that and with Bump, imagine you meet the CEO of Microsoft. Are you really going to go up to him and say, give me the pound and bump fists with him?

No, not really. You’re going to ask for a business card. It’s a professional business tool.

Bump is fun when you’re going out and exchanging contact information. When you’re dealing on a professional level, you want to take a business card. Then you can photograph it there and hand the business card back. You can be really green about it or you can take the card back with you, take a photo and have it transcribed?

In terms of the other ones, which are OCR apps, the question is just accuracy. Do you want accuracy? For most people, the answer is yes. With OCR, it’s not accurate. You have to go back in and edit yourself. It really becomes a waste of time and you get annoyed with the app.

We want people to be happy and satisfied when they get their contact back.

Your business model is quite obvious. Are you guys profitable right now?

Julian: We’re very close to profitable. The next steps for us in the bigger picture is something where we can sell business card transcription credits to large companies. For example, Ford could buy 100,000 business cards and pass them out to all their employees. As they’re going out and doing sales and they collect business cards, they can do.

We also want to white label the solution to integrate it into other apps, especially CRM apps like Sales Force or High Rise – where when you meet a contact who’s really a business lead, you can add their business card, you can have all their contact information — you can add other layers that that app is designed for as well.

That’s really the next step for us.

Can you tell me a little bit about the company? When was it formed, who are your founders and are you funded or looking for Funding?

Julian: The app was launched in January. Fabian Suliman is the main developer. I’m personally responsible for the business development in the US and launching it on the US market and doing the marketing.

It’s not funded in the sense that it is self-funded. We’re doing a revenue share with the main developer, so we’re partners.

Are you looking for more Funding?

Julian:We would definitely be looking for funding, especially for doing the Enterprise solutions side of things where we do the white label and where we can integrate and we build an API so people can push information to us or pull information back.

Eventually it’s something where transcription services extend beyond just business cards. It’s receipts. It’s documents. It’s notes. There’s lots of potential for it. We’ve actually been approached by people about doing it for things other than business cards. That’s where funding is the next step to build that API.