Our Phones Connect Us With Everything, But We Still Connect With Scrap Paper
A Networking Paradigm Shift
It’s 2018 and we still carry around paper business cards. An outdated, environmentally harmful tradition. Seems bizarre how our portable devices have more computing power than three year old laptops, yet not one software product has been able to create a universal contact sharing solution.
Not that they haven’t tried.
In fact, the tech world is filled with graves (and acquisitions) of contact management applications — from Bump (acquired by Google) to CardMunch (acquired by LinkedIn) and subsequently closed in favor of Evernote integration, and others. Many have attempted to disrupt this industry without luck.
But why? The problem seems pretty obvious.
Digital solutions could not get rid of the paper business card because they had been missing the core reason as to why people use paper: the universal and seamless exchange experience.
Up until recently, there was no technological capability to guarantee such an experience. Business card apps lack the UX of traditional paper. Paper business cards are seamless and effective: all the needed information can be given to someone in one move.
Most apps either became business card scanners, which is a separate use case in and of itself, or just didn’t get the essential necessity of creating value in the ordeal — the user experience.
If you were creating a p2p connection platform, apart from the highly problematic technology that was available (GPS is inaccurate, BT and NFC is not cross-platform etc.) you were faced with the infamous chicken or egg problem where both users needed to have the app for it to have any utility. With its 125 million users, Bump was the only app that managed to get close to needed market penetration, but was acquired and shut down to make way for Google Nearbys API before it could make any big changes to the networking culture.
Then came the scanners: ABBYY, ScanBizCards etc. These guys tackled the other problem: archiving and managing your existing received business cards. That is a separate (and valid) case, but it still doesn’t challenge the existing status quo of paper business card exchange, instead working around it. Some of these contact scanner apps added the ability to send your contact to the other person’s email, which is a step in the correct direction, but still not enough to cause a paradigm shift from traditional paper.
It’s all about the exchange experience, and not a single app could crack that.
In general, even paper business card exchange has dropped as a networking standard. Oftentimes people don’t even bring business cards to events anymore as phone numbers and addresses are not as important for connecting. In my extensive networking experience, people would rather immediately try to find you on Linkedin or Facebook by name or email, or just spell out their phone number after some extensive talk.
Most of existing contact sharing apps required that information anyway to share your details, meaning you had to spell out your email within the app so that you could share your vCard. That begged the question: if you could connect directly via LinkedIn or have someone type in their phone with someone using the same exact mechanics, why would you want to take an extra step by going through an app?
And then comes another question: you’ve exchanged contacts. Now what? There is no added layer of information that you can get from the experience, essentially making the use cases of these apps extremely limited to half an hour a month after a conference during a scan binge.
And that’s why we decided to blend the best and market-validated features of OG contact sharing apps with a seamless, universal exchange experience and an added layer of information that you can receive on the spot, without breaking the networking flow.
DROP (Digital Resolution to Obsolete Paper) encompasses a scanner which shares your details to the phone number and email of the card and lets you do a quick search of the persons basic information: media mentions, work history etc, with a proprietary patented proximity pairing technology called Resonance Nearby. Resonance Nearby uses a devices ambient noise signature to find nearby users which can seamlessly find people that have already downloaded the app. As a last resort, you could always just share a direct link to your personal online vCard or let your new contact scan a QR code using his built in camera (lot’s of people still don’t know about this feature in iOS 11). The other features of card scanners, like CRM integration, are a given.
DROP allows you to share not just the typical business card data, but any social network profile which you can click to seamlessly connect or follow.
DROP was piloted at a TEDX event where a speaker off stage prompted the audience to link up with him via Resonance Nearby in DROP and managed to connect 800 people simultaneously because of their shared ambient noise. More people were able to connect then than during the whole preceding networking event. Thousands of business cards were exchanged in a matter of seconds and TEDX’s Facebook page was riddled with satisfied users.
Up until DROP, digital business card solutions only focused on scanning business cards or simply failed. We merged a seamless transition from paper by merging a scanner, with a device pairing technology and other methods of contact sharing effectively giving our users the seamless first contact experience that has been dearly associated with paper business card. DROP has captured every first contact case where it isn’t even important for the other party to have the application to get its benefits, along with an added layer of valuable information that you might need while in the field..
You can try it now for free at dl.getdrop.net and on the App Store and Google Play.
Michael is the co-founder and President of Resonance Software which has developed a seamless phygital contact exchange application that uses custom BCR and a patented proximity pairing technology. For more information visit http://www.getdrop.net and http://www.getresonance.net