Disruptive tech is sniffing your business card

Do you carry a business card? I bet you do. Isn't it strange that in this day and age of smartphones, LinkedIn and FaceBook, we still print and carry paper business cards. No business meeting or networking event is complete without that ritual of exchanging printed cards. How did the sharing of phone numbers, email addresses, urls and more, all of which are part of our digital identity, end up on a printed paper card?

Business cards are not without their digital selves. A search on App Store lists many good alternatives for the paper business card or tools to help digitise paper cards. However we still seem to love our paper cards. Companies still print paper business cards for their employees. At gatherings like conferences and trade shows we fill our pockets with few dozen. But it’s a card we often lose or have no recollection where or how we got it. Not to mention the waste of paper and the cards with outdated details like when the owner of a card changes employers or their contact information are updated.

What makes the business card perennial (if I may use that word)? What have the existing digital solutions missed out on? Two key things about the paper cards stand out. Simplicity and creative identity. The exchange of cards is a simple and a hassle free way of passing all of your contact details. Not to mention that we have been doing it for so long. On the other hand, a business card is not just a piece of paper with your contact details. It carries the creative identity of yourself, your business or your employer. Think about the creative aspects we care about when selecting a card design. There you go, we talk about a “design”. The colours, font, layout, artwork, print quality, back side content and on. We want it to be unique and carry a statement beyond the content it carries. Many of the current digital solutions have missed out on these two aspects. Their focus have been the plain data it carries, and apart from a photo of yourself, no creative freedom is available. Then there are other things such as the ability to manage multiple cards, easy integration with your phone book, and helpful social networking features such as publishing cards on public domain and the ability to post a status update.

The good news is, a recent addition to the space of digital business cards have the right approach in mind. GotKard, an app to create and manage business cards, addresses the gaps highlighted above and lets the user design a card or capture their existing one. It also has a feature to create what’s called a ‘personal card’ to keep your business identity separate from your personal one. GotKard might be the app that carries the business card into the digital space with a sustainable solution to that card we just can't seem to lose.

Download - You can download GotKard from the App Store.

Website - Learn more at www.gotkard.com