Should the Business Card Die?
June 17, 2010We discussed the current state of business cards last month, but the subject came up again in a recent article by Josh Catone from Mashable. In 2007, Amy Verner wrote (pre-iPhone) in The Globe and Mail that the ”growing number of Blackberry users presaged the end of the traditional business card”.
Catone notes that at a recent conference, he collected so many business cards that his wallet nearly burst, so clearly, the end of the business card has not arrived yet, however, most of them ended up in a recycling bin. So, should business cards die in place of a less disposable pixilated version? There are already many Smart Phone Apps that enable you to trade contact info quickly. The IPhone has Bump, which enables you to transfer and receive personal info from another iPhone by merely bumping them together. Though the application is very cool, at the end of the day, you are only exchanging data, it doesn’t have the look and feel of a business card. A business card offers more personality that a mere contact page in a phone, but as Smart Phones become more the norm and new fancy business card applications come around, I suspect we will start to see the end of the business card.
You can read Cartone’s article here.