A Business Card Hack That is Ripe for Use Today.

When I attend large gatherings like exhibits, conferences, and symposiums to see and listen to the latest stuff coming out of the different industries, one of the things that I have noticed happening in these events is the amount of business cards that are exchanged. It is huge! When I get home, I would count like at least 20 business cards and several more product brochures. And just like anybody else, I would put away the cards, hoping that someday, I will find time to encode them in my contact list of my computer or smartphone, or probably in my tablet. Whenever I find the time, I spend hours and hours encoding data. While researching for ways to speed up the storing process, I learned that there are many solutions on how to store the business card information.

Below are the ways and technologies that exist now and are in use.

1. The most popular, is the old fashion Rolodex business card organizer or its equivalent, the physical business card organizer boxes. Bulky, but it works and it may be here to stay for as long as we continue to give away business cards.

2. The upcoming product that is becoming popular is the evolving digital scanning platform. The models range from simple scanners that "takes a picture" of the actual card and saves it as a file in your computer to complex ones that are equipped with advance optical character recognition software that converts the texts in the business card and store the information in a format that can be stored in your contact list. The cheapest one I saw is $85 from Dymo and the most advance cost as high as $300. It's a great solution for those with large volumes of business cards to process, but quite expensive for common entrepreneurs.

3. The smartphone camera. Ingenious and widely used by most of us. It is the most practical solution created by the common folk. This is how it works. You take a picture of the business card with your smartphone and problem solved. It is stored in your smartphone and can be passed around as a file to a person or to another device via MMS. It might even be the most practical, but I beg to disagree. Practical? Yes, when you are taking the picture, but not the most efficient. It is not searchable, you can not import it in your native contact list, the numbers and email address in a photo are not clickable and cannot interwork with your smartphone's phone or messaging functions. And the most bothersome of all? Wait till you have taken several hundred pictures and your smartphone starts to become sluggish. Apps tend to open slower, sometimes your phone would crash. It is a memory hog. One remedy to the running-out-of-memory problem is, to transfer the files to your computer at the end of the day, that is if you can remember and you would have the time. Often times, procrastination sets in and before you know it, you have forgotten what you needed to do.

4. There is an app for that. This is basically number 2 and number 3 combined and probably one of the most popular for smartphone users. It is small, handy, and readily available. It's probably everything a mobile business warrior would want. I personally like the app that is exclusive to Samsung Smartphone owners. The app is called the Optical Reader. Quite accurate. There is an iOS version called the CardCam or CC. You take a picture of the business card and the software attempts to recognize the characters and identify words and numbers as Name, Company Name, Address, Phone number, etc. And it stores everything in vCard format that can be stored in any contact list. Perhaps the most perfect solution? Nearly. Accuracy is dependent on how well you can take very clear pictures. And it works well, until you break or lose your phone. Good-bye contacts ;-) I believe time will come when they equip it with an online repository which you can pull your saved contacts from anywhere. I'm actually building this model in one of my products. It's a great feature. By the way, installing the app will eat up Megabytes of memory. The more you scan, the more memory it eats.

5. Some of the cards I receive have QR codes at the back. QR codes are like product bar codes, but better because they can store more information like texts, numbers and URLs. Luckily, I have a QR code reader app in my smartphone to read the QR codes. They are also available for download in the App store of Apple and Google. Warning, improperly putting a QR code in your business card can mess up the design and aesthetics. Use it only if you are willing to inject a sense of practicality in your business card. It just makes it easier to store the information from the business card to my phone. My business card also has a QR code at the back. It opens my contact link.

6. Putting a QR code in a business card to make it easier to save the contact information to a contact list is one way to upgrade your business card's functionality. This gave way to NFC enabled business cards. NFC stands for near field communications. It is a scanning technology that uses radio waves to transfer information from the card to the smartphone. The technology is widely used in newer Android smartphones, but unfortunately, Apple did not open their NFC implementation to the way we want to use them, which is for reading texts and URLs. I still have to see a business card that is NFC enabled. I've seen them in the Internet, but have not seen an actual person using it. Oh wait, there's one, me! But I use it for demonstration purposes only. NFC enabled business cards are quite expensive, about $5 each. The objective is not to give it away, but for someone to just scan it using an NFC equipped smartphone, an Android or Windows smartphone to be specific. Sorry iPhone users, but Apple's attitude towards NFC, whether for security or marketing reasons, is preventing you from enjoying this feature.

The way we use our business cards have been unchanged for decades. Nobody ever challenged how we use it because it fulfills its intended function and that is, to be able to give away our contact information. The race to build the best app that can easily store information from the business card to our contact lists continues.

Looking at the developed apps, products and solutions, it seems that they were all invented or developed to solve one lingering question, "Is there a convenient way to save the contact information in the business card into a storage device?"

Kontakme's solution does not seek to answer that same question, but to provide a solution from a different perspective. What if people can look at your business card and immediately memorize the information that would allow them to connect with you? After all, the business card's main purpose is to provide the information on how to connect with you among other things. Kontakme's contact links are personalized links that can be added in business cards without destroying the aesthetics. It is readable and can easily be memorized within a few repetitions compared to a phone number. It can be opened using any regular Internet browser which means the receiver does not need to download any special application. The Internet browser is installed in all smartphones, tablets and computers. The contact link opens a contact page where the rest of the contact information can be accessed and downloaded to the device when required.

This simple upgrade to your business card makes you part of the solution to make it easier to share, memorize and recall contact information. A universal solution that is ripe for use today.

Tags :Business Cards, Contact Links, NFC, QR code, Scannable Technology