It seems the big thing these days is to ditch your traditional business cards and find a way to easily exchange your info with others via new smart phones and the interwebs. Some might say that traditional cards are dead, although I am not ready to sign their death certificate, and many companies are banking on their service as being the “one” to replace those little cards. One that has recently launched and come on the local radar is DubMeNow. Last week they threw a huge launch party at Seqouia in Georgetown to drum up some excitement and tell everyone a bit about their new product.
I will start by passing along what DubMeNow is according to their About page
Dub allows anyone with a smart phone to instantly text or email all their contact information to another smart phone. The contact data loads directly to the user’s mobile address book and updates automatically whenever a contact changes their information.
Dub eliminates the need to swap, save, enter or update any more business card data. Additionally, you can invite contacts to connect via social networking sites like LinkedIn, ‘tag’ or note information about the contact and see when and where you met.
It would typically be at this point I give you some insight on the product after trying it out … but since they do not offer an iPhone version of their application as of yet, I cannot not. I must say I was really surprised that they would spend so much time and effort to launch their product to a big crowd and not have an application ready for the fastest growing sector in the smartphone market, iPhone owners.
That being said, I do like the idea of getting rid of business cards and going with a service like DubMeNow. I have been using MyDropCard for some time now and have been really impressed with them. Their service is a web serivce and thus can be used across platforms without having to install anything. One nice feature of DropCard is the ability to have two different cards, one for Business and one Personal. There is also Contxt, which allows you to share all of your information in one txt message.
There is one particular feature of DubMeNow that I cannot figure out if I like ot not .. the ability to have your data automatically changed on your “friends” contact platform when you amke a change in the central location. While I see this as a pretty cool feature on one hand, another side of me wants to keep things a little more compartmented and isolated off from others. It is a rather intersting feature to have the ability to update my new phone number and it is automatically updated on othe DubMeNow users contact management system, but what if I dont want that new phone number to reach everyone, maybe just a subset ? I am not sure if this is possible with DubMeNow … I’ll have to wait and see 
And for those of you old school networkers out there who still hand out the trusty paper cards, Steven Fisher has a great post on Technosailor about what to do and not to do when designing and producing your business cards.
Oh yeah, if anyone has tried out DubMeNow we would love a comment on what you think. And while we are commenting … your thoughts on traditional versus this new digital business cards ? Discuss
