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Comment by bduerst | Hacker News Reader

I routinely throw away stacks of those analog cardboard identifiers, because they're almost completely useless to me and the overhead to manage them isn't worth it.

Manually enter them into a computer? No thanks. Take out your phone to take a picture of it? Well we're back at taking a phone out of our pocket again.

If it were a little more expensive to share these identifiers, then maybe people would only share it when they are more meaningful? If that were easy to maintain, all the more better?

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"Manually enter them into a computer? No thanks. Take out your phone to take a picture of it? Well we're back at taking a phone out of our pocket again."

The cardboard lets you defer "taking a phone out of your pocket" until you're no longer engaged in the face-to-face interaction.

If I want to stay in touch with the person, I keep it until I get home, connect with them on LinkedIn, and then throw it out. I only need it long enough to remember their name and company, but it's a real help for that.

And I agree with that! What happens when they don't have a business card?

Or what if you lose it along the way?

In both of those cases I either do my best to remember their info, or just do without. Not ideal for sure, but it's fairly rare in my experience.

As others have commented, it's better to make capturing that info asynchronous. What we need is something like CardMunch, only more automated, that OCRs it into an actionable contact. (with context like LinkedIn and Twitter profiles) Even better, it would capture time, location, etc. Cardboard doesn't store context well, but when I've been at a busy conference as an exhibitor, and they have an app for scanning badges with notes, etc, in the time it took me to add additional context, I may have missed 10 potential leads while I was screwing with my phone.

It's better workflow to get a stack of 50 cards & take pictures 1x1 than to manually enter contact info 1x1 at a conference. I want to optimize for facetime while I'm at a conference.

What happens when the people you meet don't have business cards? Either don't carry them or they run out. That's slowly starting to happen more and more

I'm guilty of this. I stopped carrying business cards because of their supreme lack of value.

If I meet someone who truly does want to connect with me, I end up directing them to linkedin or writing my email address on one of their cards.

We used to use a scanner that would automate the process (scan in business cards>CRM, which was Salesforce in our case) in '05. I'm sure there's even more competition at this point, but I haven't looked.

EDIT: There was a tray, so ~100 cards could be loaded with a couple clicks after being setup correctly.

Cool idea: Conferences should give you, as part of your swag bag, a prepaid postage envelope for you to drop all of your received business cards in. Partner with a provider who scans them in and sends you the results.

We're planning to add OCR to the email field to have that part :)

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