Well, I completely understand and appreciate his habit as a sales professional to pass a business card to his schoolmate in that context. He was also patient and passionate enough to give me a pitch about what his company does and his role in it. And I knew that he was doing so after ten hours' phone calls on his job.
But let's face this: who's still going to keep and read your business card today? If I want to get a hold of him, I'd most likely text him, Facebook him, or throw a quick email to his personal email, as opposed to his company email on the card. If I somehow need to know more about his company or job title, I'd most likely go to his Linkedin profile. All this can be done with a few clicks or, even quicker, by touching the screen on my Android phone.
Not without irony, the awesome product Michael talks about all day long with his great radio voice is basically a cloud-based database. Just like how Linkedin plays as an online storage of business cards, his company sells a system to empower businesses with enormous amount of data stored on line. This is the idea of cloud.
This week I started using a website called OhLife (ohlife.com). It sends you an email every evening asking how your day went. You can keep a personal journal by replying the email. I always enjoy writing as a way of self-reflection. To my pleasure, the interface of this website is simple and elegant enough to keep me interested.
One more free invention I just started embracing is dropbox, which gives you some virtual space that can synchronize files between Android phone and computer. Again, it is an example of how the invisible clouds change the way we do things.
I don't know where the "clouds" are taking us to. But one thing I know is business card is not the last thing to die from it.
