The SMS Business Card - Never Leave Home With It

Ever been out at the grocery store, in an airplane, or at a friends house for a small gathering and sparked a business conversation with someone that could be turned into $$$$ for you…then you reach in your pocket only to find you didn’t bring your business card with you?  For you singles…how about the times you meet someone who that chemistry is sparking with and you have to split so fast that you don’t have time to do much more than say a “nice to meet you” and hand your business card…and you don’t have it?

I dream of days that I will be able to simply press a button on my phone that will send my vCard via to the cell phone of my choice.  That doesn’t exist yet though.  So for now, ID345, a Denver based company, has launched their website, www.contxts.com with a nifty little solution for this.  May not be as easy and convenient as the vCard idea, but it definitely is moving toward that direction.

All you do is go to the site, register your info,  and customize how you want the SMS message to appear when received.  The site is fairly new, so most people who have signed up have been able to have the user ID be just their first name.  Once you have your user ID and customized card saved, all you have to do is have whomever you want to have all your contact info to text your user ID, mine is “luisg” for example, to 50500 and the person will received a text that is your customized message. 

In my case, mine is in the format:

Luis Guajardo
Title
Mobile
Company
Email
Company Website

I have used this a few times.  As time goes on, I think I’ll become accustomed to using it a bit more.  But what I use more is… I can text 50500 the cell phone number of a person I want to send my SMS Business Card and that number will recieve my info.  The technology is not that sophisticated, rather this is more a product of a simple great idea.  What will be interesting is to see what this company, or others that follow, comes up with to improve upon this idea.  Perhaps we’ll one day see the WIFI vCard pass using a button on our cell phones!!

What’s interesting is that TechCruch, a well respected blog on the tech news around the world, wrote an article on the fact that we need to eliminate the paper business card (See Article).  Personally, I try to avoid printing out everything possible.  This is a world that is becoming more and more paperless.  One argument I have to this simple SMS business card, is that this idea removes the creative component to the business card.  As a business owner myself, and a designer, I spent a lot of time designing my logo to establish my brand.  But the solution is simple, contxts should start allowing users to create a jpg image that can be uploaded and sent as a pic SMS text.  I’ll be waiting for that upgrade in the next year or so guys!!

Comments

[Gayley Knight]

Geat find. Thanks.
/gayley
businessherway.net
twitter.com/mothergeek

[Dean]

Along this same line, DropCard is a new service that allows you to text them and have it deliver your information via email to your new contact. This might be a better way for those concerned about their new contact losing their info. It visually looks like a business card as well. It's a free service unless you want logos, etc and then there is a monthly fee.