Earlier this month at the Office 2.0 conference, I ran out of business cards. Maybe it’s happened to you. You fumble around in your pocket and come up empty-handed. Somehow I was caught off guard. I put in a new order online (our company has at least automated all of that), but still hadn’t received the shipment before I left for the Knowledge Leadership Forum two weeks later.
Dropcard aims to solve that problem, and could even eliminate the need for business cards altogether–a very green idea. I read about Dropcard on WebWorkerDaily and immediately saw how I could’ve used this.
How it works
The concept is simple. You register on Dropcard and can create two profiles: business and personal. You control how much or little information you want to share. When you want to send your “business card” to someone, you do so either via text message to 41411. When I meet Bill G., I can ask for his email, then send him my Dropcard by texting drop [email protected] to 41411.
If you’re using an iPhone, you can thank your lucky starts and skip the text message, opting instead to use the clean, web interface you see to the right. Either way, it’s quick and easy.
What happens next?
Once you send an instruction to send someone your contact info, they get a nicely formated email with all your details and a vCard attachment for quick import to Outlook.
Dropcard allows you to enter multiple phones, addresses, chat networks, websites and personal profile addresses.
There are no advertisements. Dropcard is supported by paid subscriptions. With a free account, you can send up to 15 Dropcards per month. $4.99 a month gives you as many as 20 profiles, and the ability to send up to 100 Dropcards per month. $9.99 a month gives you unlimited Dropcards.
Oh yeah, my old skool carbon-based business cards did finally arrive this week. I’m not ready to ditch them, but Dropcard will be a handy backup in the future.
It seems like this wouldn’t be too hard to do yourself given some clever coding and a dedicated Twitter account. Set up an extraneous Twitter account and use the API to check for new direct messages on a periodic basis – you could have the message include a number/letter/code (for whatever “profile” you want to send) and an e-mail, and a server-side script does the rest.
Now that I think of it, I might actually try that out.
It seems like this wouldn’t be too hard to do yourself given some clever coding and a dedicated Twitter account. Set up an extraneous Twitter account and use the API to check for new direct messages on a periodic basis – you could have the message include a number/letter/code (for whatever “profile” you want to send) and an e-mail, and a server-side script does the rest.
Now that I think of it, I might actually try that out.