Idea for new service: digital businesscards
We are meeting with a lot of people here in the New York and exchanging businesscards with most of them. A few hours before the trip I realized I didn’t have any current businesscards so I made some. I used extra thick paper and printed only my name on one side and just my emailaddress on the other side. I like businesscards a lot but am always wondering on how to improve the the whole system.
There is a format for digital businesscards called VCF which stands for Virtual Card Format. You can just export any address from most of the addressmanagement applications to this format. You will end up with a small file which you can email or share in any way with other people. You can also use this website to generate a vCard.
I keep my vCard on my desktop so I can just attach it to email if I want.
I now have a stack of businesscards here with a lot of information and the thought of typing them all in makes me depressed. I do have a CardReader at the office but I won’t be there until next week. I also want those people I have met to have my information. So I came up with a simple solution to getting businesscards I receive digitizes easily and from anywhere and getting my businesscards digitally to anybody who gets my business cards.
1: handling businesscards I receive
I would like to photograph those businesscards, upload them to Flickr, OCR them there and get the resulting vCard file back to me via email or the web. That way the whole process would take about a minute or two.
2: giving people my vCard file with a paper businesscard
I want to set up a new emailaddress with an auto-reply which automatically returns my vCard file to people who email to that address. The address would be something like boris.vcard@bomega.com and maybe also personal.vcard@bomega.com in case I want to have another vCard for friends with also my mobile number and home address.
People I give my businesscard to could then simply send an empty message to that emailaddress and get my vCard returned within a few minutes.
One of the questions you could ask is how about privacy? Anybody could get your businesscard then? But the same thing that applies for your paper businesscard would apply for your vCard file too. Yes, anybody could forward this emailaddress to other people who could then also get your vCard. But they can also do this with just your paper businesscard, right?
As soon as I get back and have a few hours left I will set up this system for myself and change my businesscards. I don’t think I would be able to build the photo OCR system myself so before I invest time and money in that I’ll first have to check out if this service isn’t available already.
Who would be interested in using these services too? If enough people are I could offer it as a service…
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10 Responses to “Idea for new service: digital businesscards”
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You can also just put the vCard on your webspace: http://www.bomega.com/12321.vcard or something, so that not everybody could access it so easily.
Mobile phones also have a “send card through bluetooth” option, maybe you should check that out.
[...] to have an even better solution than handing people a piece of paper with my name on it. I once had an idea for an auto-reply [...]
To convert business cards to vCard with your camera phone, see http://www.scanr.com/bc.aspx (North American business card format only for now).
You can attach your business card (virtaully) to your web pages / blog by using the hCard microformat. This format consists of pure html with the possibility to use any display style you rlike through CSS.
(…still typing, hit return, form submitted, aaargh!).
See microformats.org/ | http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard
The hCard data can then be exported to vCard by either using a Technorati service, or one of the emerging microformats plugins for Firefox (e.g. Operator, Tails and more).
I did a simple experiment on a placeholder page with just address information, see http://kinderfysio-denhaag.nl/ for an example of how to use the Technorati service.
See microformats.org/ | http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard
The hCard data can then be exported to vCard by either using a Technorati service, or one of the emerging microformats plugins for Firefox (e.g. Operator, Tails and more).
I did a simple experiment on a placeholder page with just address information, see http://kinderfysio-denhaag.nl/ for an example of how to use the Technorati service.
Xpine.com was something that tried to handle this issue as well…
Emmma man loool i cant belive you sed that about the digital buisness card!!!!
loooll
luv youuuu……xxx
jodie is gay!!
You to are gay!!! and whats with a man and a business card?
at least it ent emma washing her dog!! lolololololol :L:L
Love yas both :D
x
fuck off toni …..i luvthat buisness card