This is my business card.
Not terribly fancy. Not customized with a logo or pretty fonts. And it exists only in electronic form.
It’s been about fifteen years since IBM excitedly announced that they were working on technology that would let people exchange business cards automatically, just by shaking hands. That would require that each party have a little device in their pocket to make the exchange of “business cards” happen, and while the technology was developed far enough to make it a reality in a lab, no consumer product ever materialized.
There’s an app for SmartPhones called Bump that sort of does this, by the way. The problem with Bump, though, is that it only works if you and the person you meet are both running the App on your Android or iPhone. No good; business cards need to be device and situation agnostic.
So with props to GigaOM for pointing it out to me, today I’d like to tell you about CardCloud. CardCloud makes it so that I can now get about as close as is possible to fulfilling my New Years Resolution for 2011 of no longer carrying business cards.
While it has no native app for anything but the iPhone (so far), CardCloud makes it practical for me to zap my information to you just by pointing you at my CardCloud address. Simple. Easy. Ubiquitous. And let’s be honest: you hate transcribing the information off business cards anyway, and CardCloud means you don’t have to. Once I point you at “me” on CardCloud, my information is a click from your address book.
The beauty of this is that there’s nothing more to say. Except this: in some cultures, the formal act of exchanging business cards still matters, so if for example you’re traveling on business in Asia I recommend that you carry and use paper business cards.
Thanks, CardCloud. Real business change is usually a lot more painful than this.
