Comment by dgallagher | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dgallagher | Hacker News Reader

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Biz cards are a pain in the butt:

1) You've got to design and pay to print them. If titles or contact info changes, that's a re-print. The cost matters a lot particularly to the SoHo market.

2) You've got to carry them around with you everywhere to hand out. Usually this is in a metal case that's kinda cumbersome in a pocket shared with an iPhone/BlackBerry already.

3) When someone hands you one, you've gotta stick it in your pocket and not lose it.

4) After you bring them to your office, you need to file them somehow (scan them, manually enter them into Outlook/whatever).

I've seen people at hedge funds buy expensive scanners which plug into Outlook and let you scan this stuff in. It does OCR on the cards and auto-creates contacts for you. The scanners are around $200/each, plug into your desktop, and are a tad annoying to install and config. The cards get tossed into the trash the moment it's in Outlook.

If you don't buy a scanner for every employee, that's time wasted while they type said card info into Outlook.

While something like this won't "kill" business cards in the business world, it'll offer a nice alternative.

Here's an idea for an iPhone App that'll let someone with an iPhone do-away with biz cards all together: A scanner app using the iPhone camera. Take a snapshot* of someone's biz card, OCR it, and bam, it's in your contacts. Easier said than done, of course. But it eliminates steps 3 and 4 above, making your life easier when dealing with "legacy" business cards. :)

*Yeah, yeah, we all know how good the iPhone camera is at close-ups. Maybe the next revision? ;)

the video shows it takes about 15 seconds to launch the app, tap the button, and exchange data. now add in time to pull your phone out and unlock it (possibly with a pin). i just timed myself and it took 10 seconds to take the phone out of my pocket, slide the unlock bar, put in my pin, push the home button to get out of the last app i was in, and scroll to the home screen of apps.

so 25 seconds may not seem like a long time, but realistically, standing in front of someone for 25 seconds doing nothing is pretty awkward. really, try it. go up to someone and stand there counting to 25 in your head. now consider doing that in front of someone you don't really know (otherwise why would you be exchanging information?)

now consider pulling a business card out of that same pocket and handing it to the person. they can say thanks and put it in their pocket without even looking at it, then process it later.

Thanks for that, it didn't even occur to me. :) Yeah, the social awkwardness factor kinda blows it in some instances, doesn't it?

If you could run it as a background service on the iPhone (which you can't without jailbreak), you could cut 15 seconds off that time.

Maybe given the current technical limitations it'll work better in some social settings than others. Informal ones where time isn't pressed, like hanging out with a group of people. Or at a convention. If you're sitting in a booth you could have an iPhone sitting on the table with the app open and ready to go. A passer-by might want to shoot you an email later, so they pull out their iPhone, bump yours, and away they go...

I guess thinking about it more it probably works in some situations better than others. It's niched though, and that's the stuff of entrepreneurial gold. ;)

I don't think it would be socially awkward, because the 2 people involved are not just standing around doing nothing for the 25 seconds; they are both busy tapping their phones.

You'll probably be able to cut that time down if you don't use a pin code (I don't), and if you put the app in the bottom row of apps.

Business cards are a pain if you ever want to use the information. Most people don't type them up so if you ever need the information you have to scramble to find the card so you can call/email the person. Once you factor in the time it takes to store the information on a business card Bump is more competitive time wise (but of course I am biased).

At most of the business mixers that I've gone to people later add the contacts to LinkedIn, at which point they can grab a vCard if they need to import it elsewhere. It might be worth looking into the LinkedIn API to see if you can try to get a similar workflow with Bump.

General-purpose OCR (the task to properly scan, recognize and categorize information on the card) isn't a solved problem. I like the idea of placing QR Code (or Beetag for more aesthetics) on the card for machine processing. There are QR Code readers for every reasonable mobile phone in the world.

Great thoughtful comments. I have had a similar experience with business cards. I didn't always have them when I wanted them (hated carrying them everywhere when I wasn't working) and the ones I got piled up uselessly on my desk (neither my admin or card scanner could reliably add contacts to Outlook without typos). Bump may not be for everyone right now, but we will keep trying to change that by adding features that business cards can't compete with and porting to other platforms.

Re your idea: I believe Evernote.com has that capability.

Yep, and you can get a case (Clarifi by Griffin) that noticeably improves the inbuilt camera to make this really easy.

something like this is hardly an alternative, since it requires everyone to own the iphone(hardly a cheap toy) and the app.

That's true, and an excellent point.

If you go back to the days when Palm Pilots were the rage, you could beam your business card over the IR port on them. People still used biz cards, but two people who had a Palm didn't.

I'm probably a bit bias as I live in a city (Boston) that's littered with iPhones. Lots of people have them, including my friends. There is a mini-technology gap between people who have them and those who don't. If you're in the "iPhone crowd" something like this seems really cool. Otherwise, meh.

If this suddenly worked on every cell phone in the world tomorrow, not just iPhone's, you'd probably have a lot more people interested in it.

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