Are you looking for something different than a CRM? Typically people will scan the business cards they get from a tradeshow with something like Worldcard and import the CSV into whatever CRM their organization uses.

For all intents and purposes I suppose I'm looking for a minimalist CRM. By virtue of being extremely early-stage (looking for co-founders and investors) the simpler and cleaner the interface the more it will suit my needs. Perhaps I could roll my own SugarCRM with 95% of features turned off, but I think there has got to be a turn-key web app that fits the bill out there somewhere.

I'm a big fan of Streak if your primary communication tool is email.

Pipedrive. By a country mile. Lightweight CRM + contact management. And they have a sweet iOS app.

Thanks very much for the suggestion! I just signed up and it's exactly what I wanted. Going to see how the free trial goes but so far it looks great. Very intuitive interface.

"hustler founders" - every piece of shit which PG says is picked up and abused

This is interesting. Would you mind clarifying what you mean by this point?

Herp. You just reinforced his point.

carddrop.com (currently in beta but I can get you an invite) [disclaimer: I'm the co-founder]

Looks like a really cool app but currently the problem I'm trying to solve is the inverse: what do I do with clumps of contacts (new people I meet) I am trying to sort and manage day to day?

Example of one potential (but unvetted) solution: http://www.contactme.com/

I was wondering if anyone has personal experience with a particular app or platform that works well for them.

Oh I see... well right now our focus is in sharing contacts easily and keeping the parties connected. We do provide an organizer that is powered by search, ex: "PHP developer" will find contacts that has PHP development skill-set. What's interesting is you may have never known that person is a PHP developer until now.