Business Opportunities Weblog

The Future Of Biz Cards

By on November 15, 2010 in Ideas

According to a story at ReadWrteWeb, regardless of industry, there is one age-old relic of professional networking that refuses to die: the business card.

Even at the most high-tech and cutting edge of events, you still can’t mingle without collecting a pocket full of paper cards. Surely, this can’t go on forever. The business card is ripe to be disrupted. But what will replace it?

ScanBizCards is one such option. Using an iPhone 3GS or higher, take a picture of that business card your new contact just handed to you. The app recognizes text on the card, like the person’s name, phone number and email address, and then imports that information directly into your contacts. Drawbacks: Since ScanBizCards is iPhone-only, it has an obvious barrier to being widely adopted.

Using QR Codes on Business Cards. Just recently, I’ve started to notice business cards that include a 2D barcode on them so recipients can scan them to view digital content, usually the business’s Website.
Drawbacks: Although QR codes are slowly picking up greater adoption in the United States, they’re still far from being mainstream.

Whether a business card includes a QR code or not, it can usually be read by Google Goggles. The app scans the card for text and then runs a Google search for any words it finds. It also recognizes QR codes. Drawbacks: It has mixed results with different business cards, at least on the iPhone. In some cases, it searches the entire block of text (person’s name, title, email, website, etc) all in one go, which obviously doesn’t make for a very effective search query.

Photo by moo.com.

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Rich Whittle has added 6,226 posts to Business Opportunities Weblog.

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  • http://wahm.business-opportunities.biz Angela Shupe

    I like the idea behind ScanBizCards. Even though that app is only available for the iPhone, it sounds to me like there is room for another developer to create something similar that is available for more platforms.

  • http://www.tank-prints.com Mike

    I would like to see more integration of QR codes on business cards. Heck, I might even start offering them on my website! It sounds like growing trend :)

  • http://www.killerbeeprinting.com/products/brochures Cheap Brochures

    Interesting piece about the future of business cards since I own a printing company, Killer Bee Printing.

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