by KEN SCHACHTER

Collecting business cards is the province of every dedicated networker, but it took closely held CardBrowser to make that time-honored practice into a business.

The Northport company has signed up Apple Computer and added about 100 other customers in the last nine months, according to Steve Morgan, chief executive of PeopleComm Inc., the parent company of CardBrowser and salesrecruits.com, an Internet recruiting agency.

CardBrowser clients pay $2,495 to $10,000 for a one-year subscription to view an online collection of business cards.

The lure for recruiters is the business cards represent a pool of "passive" candidates who are not actively looking for a job.

"We are privately held and don't report revenue figures, but I can tell you that we are a $1 million-plus Internet company and profitable," Morgan said in an e-mail.