Search for an Electronic Replacement Finds Few Satisfying Alternatives
Feb. 4, 2014 7:03 p.m. ET
Personal Tech Columnist Joanna Stern explains why the
cards are stacked against the wireless exchange of our contact info.
When the tech-savviest people on the
planet meet, how do they exchange contact info? The same people who hail
taxis by app and pay back friends via email have a wild way of sharing
details: They hand over paper business cards.
And the only thing worse than handing
over business cards is not having any to hand over. My own new business
cards have yet to be printed. But if everyone I meet these days has a
smartphone, with memory and wireless capabilities galore, why do I even
need these 3.5 x 2 inch pieces of card stock?
Instead
of just waiting for them in the mail, I decided to seek out the paper
cards' digital replacement. The smartphone may yet hold the key, and a
few new technologies are quite promising. But most options are limited
or overly complicated. We're still waiting for the business-card
equivalent of OpenTable or Pandora when it comes to a hassle-free,
cost-effective alternative.
An overwhelming number of apps let you snap a photo
of a business card and turn them into address book entries.
Andrew Evans for The Wall Street Journal
People have tried, of course.
Google's
GOOG +0.44%
Beam lets you hold phones together to transfer information. It
uses wireless "near field communication" and works really well—provided
both phones are NFC-enabled and run Android. IPhones don't have the
necessary chips. Still, I'm not entirely sure why more Android users
don't use Beam.
CamCard card-scanning app is fast and accurate. For $2.99, you get unlimited scanning.
Joanna Stern/The Wall Street Journal
Google also owns Bump. When you
tapped two phones together, their sensors "felt" the unique collision
and the app swapped info via the Internet. IPhones and Android phones
played well together, and I often used it to transfer photos. Then last
week, Google shut it down.
Evernote, the
popular note-syncing service, updated its Hello app last year with a
novel feature: Users could swap contact info with audio tones. A welcome
sound serves as a kind of mating call, as phones discover another is
nearby. I've used the free service to swap info between iPhones and
Android devices, but it takes too many steps to compete with a
business-card handoff. And Evernote says it doesn't plan to keep working
much more on the Hello app. Instead it will bring some core features
over to its main Evernote app, and the audio feature won't make the
jump.
It became evident fairly quickly
that living without business cards would be difficult. So what if I made
my next card smartphone friendly? I could opt for a QR code—those
Rorschach-looking square bar codes—but bar-code scanning requires
special apps and transferring info to address books isn't automatic.
Evernote's business card scanning feature converts scanned cards into text in seconds, but it can be pricey.
Evernote
Some business-card makers want to
embed NFC tags into the cards themselves. That makes cards expensive. A
company called Tapmy.Biz charges $2 a piece.
That's
why I was excited to learn about a startup called Touchbase
Technologies, which is making paper cards with "conductive ink" that
work with the iPhone
and cost less. The company says its unique dot pattern emulates finger
taps on a phone's screen. Hold the card to a phone and—boom—the info
pops up almost instantly.
Information
isn't transferred from the card. Instead, the card directs the phone to
the card holder's Touchbase profile, with contact info, photos and
videos. But it's in the early stages. Debuting on Indiegogo this week,
the service won't let you export info to an address book, and support is
initially limited to iPhones.
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Making cards smartphone-friendly
invites chicken-or-egg situations. If I choose one option, most people I
meet still won't have it, or may prefer a different one.
That's why the best way to kill off business cards—for now and for a long time to come—is to scan them and toss them.
I've
always wanted a business-card scanner and I've enjoyed playing with the
$500 NeatConnect, which rapidly uploads cards, receipts and other
documents straight to the cloud, rather than to a computer. But the
scanner in my pocket—my smartphone—doesn't require an extra carry-on
bag. The challenge is wading through the overwhelming number of apps
that promise to turn your snapped cards into address book entries.
LinkedIn's free CardMunch uses humans, instead of digital means, to transcribe your card scans.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn's free CardMunch uses
humans, instead of digital means, to transcribe your card scans. When I
tried it, the humans took their time: over 6 hours for two cards. (A
LinkedIn representative says the company aims to send back card
transcriptions within 24 hours.) After all that wait, one of the cards
returned marked "Cannot Read Name." I quickly gave up on humans.
Evernote's
business card scanning feature—which can be found in the main app as
well as the Hello app—is fast, converting snapped cards into text in
seconds. The catch? It costs $5 a month, or $45 a year, for unlimited
scanning. (If you don't pay, you get just five free scans a month.)
The
best choice I've found is CamCard: $2.99 up front currently gets you
unlimited card scanning. (There's also a free, ad-supported version that
offers a limited number of scans.) It's fast and accurate, and when you
scan someone in, you can easily send that person your own info via
email or text.
I find it hard to imagine
these scraps of paper won't be replaced by a wireless exchange, through
smartphones or even, one day, a wearable or surgically implanted
technology. For now, I'm awaiting the delivery of 500 new paper
rectangles so people will know how to email, text or tweet at me.
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