Last month I posted about a method of sharing business ‘cards’ via Twitter. Yesterday, on his always excellent blog, Neville Hobson posted about using barcodes to turn physical cards into something more suitable for a business world where mobile, remote, and digital are increasingly the key words.
In Neville’s words, when it comes to business cards, “The format hasn’t really changed in years.” And when the format remains the same (as Led Zeppelin might have sung in a different context), the emphasis falls on making the card stand out. Witness the success of Moo Cards or, at the other extreme, the approach taken in this video – “Your Business card is CRAP!” – (which could quite easily be straight from a comedy skit – best line: “It doesn’t fit in a Rolodex because it doesn’t belong in a Rolodex”).
I remember when I had my first Palm PDA back in the late 90s and pointing it at other Palm owners and swapping ‘cards’ over an infrared connection. The limitations of the range and the whole need to point devices at each other rather defeated the point but it made us feel cutting edge, even if we never looked at the details of the information we shared – usually because it was with a colleague we’d known for years anyway. When I got a Nokia later, I could do something similar. Again, though, it just wasn’t quite the same as handing out a card.
Neville’s suggestion seems a perfect interim step until we have a means of sharing data universally between devices on a challenge/response setting. You can imagine turning up at a networking meeting and having your phone, netbook, or whatever set up for ‘promiscuous’ sharing, letting you pass your information to everyone who wants it and for your device to accept all data into a secure sandbox for virus checking and approval. Equally, there may be times you need to approve each share – possibly when you need to send different information to different people. In effect, the sharing should be nothing more than a link which the recipient device then uses to access the information specified in the cloud somewhere.
In the meantime, I need to put in an order to Moo for some new cards and find somewhere to store my growing collection of personal cardboard.
