Yesterday at the gas station I got to thinking about what’s going to happen when email finally becomes totally unusable because of spam and viruses (in, like, six months or so). Presumably everybody will start using whitelist email, which means that you won’t be able to email me until you somehow find your way into my address book. So then the new problem becomes: how do you quickly get people in your address book? I’ll tell you. Business cards with magnetic stripes on the back. I hand you my card, you take it back to your desk and stick it into a little reader connected to your computer, the reader picks up your digits from the back of the card and waa-laah. Instant data entry.
This will only work until somebody figures out how to encode a virus on the mag stripe, of course.
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Welcome to the blogosphere! Interesting thought!
Yee hah, my first comment! Thanks for stopping by, John.
I like the idea of physically providing the information in a way that can be loaded into an address book simply and quickly. But, I know that both biz cards and email addresses can change quite often (I haven’t yet been at a company over 2 1/2 years and my title/info has changed within each company enough to warrant at least 2 new card printings during my tenure)
Do you think there will ever be more use of the electronic “card”? Like the Palm solution of ‘beaming’ information to someone? That way, your personal info can be maintained and changed as often as needed without a lot of overhead. Maybe some sort of ‘contacts’ receiver in your keychain that doesn’t have a datebook, tasks, email or any of the other various ‘benefits’ that make these devices so overwhelming and pricey for the ordinary consumer.
Of course, having your keychain then communicate with your PC and cellphone (if someone could just find a simple way to load contact info into my cell phone and keep it current) is another problem.
Thoughts?
Hey Michele!
The beam-from-PDA idea never caught on because PDAs don’t interoperate and probably never will. The keychain idea is neat but it doesn’t let you hand something to somebody that they can then deal with at their leisure. CEOs and sales drones aren’t going to grok keychain fobs, but they already grok business cards and there’s a whole infrastructure around them. (I just happened to unearth my cool leather business card holder while rummaging around in some other junk last night, coincidentally.)
Hmm. Get your point. Well, if we’re looking for something that they use a lot, how about beer stein’s? Or golf balls? Think CEOs might work with those : )