So like most of us, I have a full time job. I work in tech, and part of my job requires me to attend technology related events, meet other professionals in the field, and evaluate new technologies, etc. Pretty standard stuff.
This year I came up with an idea as I was at a tech conference in San Francisco. I was sitting in a resting area having a sandwich, I looked down at the floor and I saw 2 business cards laying there. So, I picked them up and started looking at the information on them. They belongs to 2 of the technology vendors in the show. Immediately I thought, they must have handed these out to someone in the audience only to end up here. This happens all the time, at least to me, I get so many business cards from vendors, and other business professionals and unfortunately they usually end up being thrown away or lost. What a waste.
So there I was still chewing on this rather mediocre sandwich, catered food is the worst, and I thought — “what if they used a digital business card instead?.” I kept thinking — “there’s got to be an app for that.” Yes there are, about a dozen or so actually, but some of them are complicated, others are pricy, or you have to sign up for a bunch of stuff, and more importantly none of them seem to solve the number 1 problem I find with paper business cards. What happens when you change your info? Have to get new cards, and have to re-distribute them.
So I thought, well there must be a way to create something that I thought should have been part of the Contacts apps on mobile phones ages ago, if not for the never ending war going on between Apple and Google for global domination of your mobile. In my mind, Contacts should be able to automatically update as long as both the owner of a Contacts and the recipient with which a Contact has been shared are still synced. How cool would that be?
Lets say I give you my Contact with a phone number of 3055551234, you add it to your phone. Great, until 8 months later when I decided to change my number and now your Contact is no good. Unless of course, your Contact automatically updated with my new number. What if, I could add to that Contact shared with you, an email, or a link to a professional cv, or social media.
Furthermore, what if I could keep track of and control the people that have access to my Contacts. Lets say I shared my Contact with you, but I do not find that necessary anymore, I can just delete or stop the share and my Contact would disappear from your list.
I think the birth of social media apps, both personal and professional, are a direct result of the failure to take advantage of the first social media app that everyone has always had. The Contacts.
This is the core concept behind Biz.Cards, an app to manage digital business cards that when shared in-app with other users will be saved as Contacts that automatically update as long as the owner and the recipient are synced.
Biz.Cards allows you to create multiple digital business cards for various occasions. You can have professional business cards with your work information on them, and personal business cards with total different personal information. You can even have a totally bogus business card to share with those you don’t really want to give any info to, but you want to be polite.
The app has been around for about 2 months now on the Google Play Store and boy is it hard to penetrate any market. Even one where all available solutions are, in my opinion, less than stelar. So far we it has about 20k users.
So go out there and give it a try, if you have an android phone. If you have an iPhone, sorry you’ll just have to miss out until I finish building that :). Feedback is much appreciated.
J.
