Cardmunch, probably the most useful iOS app in the world

Cardmunch (now Cardmunch by LinkedIn) is an iPhone app (though it will work on an iPad or iPod Touch) is a business card reader that gets the details off the card and put them into your address book (and if wanted, request the user to connect on LinkedIn).

That doesn't sound very exciting, but what actually happens is that a picture of the card is sent to a real person (similar to Amazon's Mechanical Turk) and they type in the details they can read and at some point later the application notifies you that the card is ready.

This means that you get back the card data which tends to be pretty clean and accurate (without having all the graphics data there too).

Once in your address book, it's easy to search for new cards as they all have "scanned by Cardmunch ..." and any oddities can be easily fixed.

Once you use it, you'll never look back.