DropCard the business card killer
The Techcrunch 50 blur has already begun and buddy Allen Stern (looking forward to meeting him on Monday) has just saved me a ton of time and energy.
The usual thing for me is to collect hundreds of business cards, lose some as usual and spend the flight home sending emails re-introducing myself to the people I have already made contact with in case they lost my card
DropCard eliminates this.
“Here’s how the service works. You setup an account on DropCard that includes all of your social networking account information. Then I head out to a conference or event. I meet someone new and have a good discussion with her or him. At the end of the conversation, the point where you would normally exchange cards, you now ask the person for their email address. You send their email address via SMS to DropCard. DropCard then immediately sends the person your contact information including social network profiles, name, email, etc. Now the other person can friend you up on the other networks and never has to worry about trying to locate your business card”
I have already set this up on my iPhone so anyone I meet will get my card after meeting them. Thanks guys
One thing, you were looking for suggestions, why not go global, talk to my friend David Marcus of Zong, he could set you up with global short codes, I would definitely pay a tiny premium to insure I dont loose a contact.
Pat, what’s wrong with having a full business card for yourself setup on your contact on your phone and sending it directly via SMS?
I’ve been doing this for ages and it works perfectly..
SMS costs firstly
Secondly on the road SMS costs a lot plus it only gets to their phone
This reaches their mail clients which is my main target, I haven’t a lot of interest on getting my number on someone’s phone
Email costs too, it is just charged in a less direct way. Also as a lot more phones become people primary means of connecting (data as well as voice) combined with people syncing their phones with their laptops/desktops it would in my opinion make more sense to send the info to their phone.
What good would your number/details in their inbox be if it’s not on their phone?
Pat,
Well after you have exchanged your info then what. How do you overcome the inconvenience of having to update the information and be always in the know of that contact. How do you know if they changed companies, careers, businesses or even numbers. Wouldn’t you want to have a way to have their most recent updates handy when they call of if you call them, so that you have a context to the conversation? How do you do that? Well, that’s where we come in. We are developing a smart address book, that is a living auto-updating contextual address book. I will be at TC50 as well and I look forward to meeting you there.
cheers,
D
That sounds deadly, exactly what I need as I always end up finding a bunch of cards in the bottom of my bag!
One question - how did you manage to set it up without a US phone number or do you have one? Can’t wait for them to go global!