SMB Tech Roundup: Google Cloud Print, LinkedIn Buys CardMunch and More

Keeping up with every RSS feed item and tweet is hard enough for anybody, let alone someone trying to run a business. That’s why each week, ReadWriteBiz rounds up the most important tech news and insights for small and medium-sized businesses.

LinkedIn hinted at its own vision of the future of business cards with its acquisition of CardMunch, an iPhone app that digitizes paper business cards by scanning them. The application, which previously charged users based on usage, was made freely available by its new owners.

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Business users will appreciate Polaris Insights, a new Chrome browser plugin that pulls information about a given company from sources like CrunchBase, LinkedIn and Quora on the fly. Explains ReadWriteWeb’s own Marshall Kirkpatrick:

It will be of particular interest to journalists, investors and others who take a deep interest in the websites of various businesses but it’s a great example of bigger things, of course. Specifically, of the kind of value add that can be built by using distributed social media data to provide context to a given document. It’s pretty hot.

On Friday, we reviewed a new Web app called Export.ly, a simple tool for exporting social media analytics in richly formatted, chart-heavy Excel files or plain text CSV files. Export.ly comes from Simply Measured, the company that created RowFeeder, another tool for analyzing social media metrics.

Here on ReadWriteBiz, our most-read post of the week was about Google Cloud Print, Google’s wireless mobile printing solution for Gmail and Google Docs, which finally started to get rolled out this week. Continuing with the theme of mobile productivity, we reviewed Todo.tx Touch, a task management app for Android that was released this week.

Here on ReadWriteBiz, we looked at two infographics published by Intuit. One visually compared the costs of running a small business in various countries around the world and the other celebrated the ten year anniversary of QuickBooks Online with some hard numbers about that product’s success.

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