Business Cards And The Future

Business cards have come a long way from the time they were first introduced. Whereas at first the Chinese and later the French used them as calling cards, we now have a business card culture that stipulates its exchange as part of business etiquette. Yet one has to wonder what the future holds for these tiny little, typically rectangular cards. Will they be obsolete in the near future? How will they compete with electronic directories and search engines?

Business Cards And Their Electronic Variants

Most people with a bit of experience in the field of computers know electronic business cards as v-cards. These are simple digital versions of those paper-based business cards we often carry around in our wallets or wherever we choose to keep our business cards.

V-cards are most often created with some of the major e-mail software packages commercially available today. More often than not, the card itself is created when a new contact is entered into an address book with the possibility of adding a unique image or photograph to identify the person. These v-cards are then attached to e-mails and sent along with the body of the e-mail.

Yet one cannot help but remark that these business cards are seldom encountered on the internet and often work only between users of the same type of e-mail software. In addition they seem to be somewhat cumbersome as an attachment, especially as the majority of internet users are unaware of their existence and will therefore perhaps assume it to be a piece of malicious software. It is after all the day and age where Trojans, viruses, and a variety of backdoor programs are capable of attaching themselves an e-mail with a rather seductive and misleading title.

Business Cards And The Future

Business cards and the future – as they have gradually migrated from the classic calling card to the business card, will they move on to some other form? This is of course asked with the eye on modern technological developments, where the world seems to be getting smaller as people become more and more connected to the various search engines and social networking sites on the internet. It is, after all, something that can be trusted.

In the same breath one has to give a certain amount of recognition to business cards presented on certain media other than paper, for example a DVD or a normal computer readable CD. The benefit of these are that they are capable of not only storing the contact information of a person as well as a couple of photographs or images, but have enough space to store a vast amount of data which can include CVs, video clips, audio bites, etc. The only associated drawback is that the recipient has to be at a computer terminal to view them, which eliminates a certain aspect of business card originality and invokes a fair amount of time and labor to get some of the most basic information from the media concerned.

In the end we have to make do with what we have as the time will eventually come where paper will no longer be used, a time where all our details can be accessed with the touch of a button on a cellular telephone. Until then, however, the closes we’ll come to see the future of business cards is perhaps our ability to design them and have them printed online.

Article created on 12/1/2008

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