Technology has changed every aspect of how we do business except one: the ritual sharing of a 2-by-3 rectangle of paper we know as the business card.
The first really new business card technologies will probably be driven by near-field communications (NFC). If you are an iPhone owner, you thought you’d have this by now. But instead Google mashed the Apple and you’ll now find quite a few Android phones and devices (as well as some new Blackberry models) with NFC capability. (Check here for new devices as they come out: goo.gl/4i8jR).
Online marketing company Moo is one of the first to be ready to take advantage of NFC for business cards. Their NFC-enabled cards, expected to be available in the second quarter, are embedded with a read-write chip. You can customize – and change – the information you store on your card like contact info, of course, but also videos, maps, presentations, or maybe a product portfolio.
But the beauty of an NFC card is you don’t have to actually hand it out. You simply tap it on the receiver’s NFC-enabled smartphone and the chip performs the instructions encoded on the card – like transferring a file, importing contact information, opening a video. And using an NFC app, you can continually update the information you want to distribute as your business – or your messaging – changes. The chip inside the phone does the execution, so there’s no need for a specific app.
Mobile NFC has the potential to significantly change how we do things, enabling secure transactions without cash or credit cards, as well as information communication and transfer based on proximity.
As the resolution and quality of smartphone cameras has improved, hundreds of applications have cropped up to snap a business card, transcribe the info, then import the fields into your contacts.
These apps offer a variety of options:
• A few, not many, can handle double-sided cards.
• Some can image and store a QR tag. Others can double as a QR tag reader.
• Some will keep the scanned card in a virtual wallet on your phone.
• A few can automatically connect you to the contact’s social media and send appropriate connection requests.
• At least one will automatically send out a follow-up email – or optionally let you make changes to the standard templated text – right from the phone after it is scanned.
• Some offer cloudbased backup and syncing to multiple devices.
• Most apps are free (meaning they are ad-supported), but even those that are paid usually have a free version so you can try them out.
All these options are nice frosting, but optical character recognition (OCR) is where the rubber meets the road. If you have to spend several minutes with each card you scan correcting errors, you might as well have typed the information in yourself.
But there are a few apps – like Card Munch, which is owned by LinkedIn – that do just that. You take the picture and submit the card, and human transcribers type the information into a database where it is reviewed up to three times – by people. You get a perfectly transcribed card back along with a full LinkedIn profile (if the person has an account) and options to store the contact in your address book, send email or click to call.
Sorry, Googlers, but Card Munch is only for iOS devices and you have to have a LinkedIn account to use it. The other potential downside is how long it takes to get the card back. It can be an hour or a day. But for me that’s still an improvement over the week’s worth of untouched cards that used to live on the top of my desk.
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Laura Haight is the president of Portfolio (portfoliosc.com), a communications company based in Greenville that leverages the power of technology and digital media to communicate effectively with clients, customers and your staff. She is a former IT executive, journalist and newspaper editor.
