I have been a big-time supporter of the team at Moo.com – they let you design your own business cards.
I’ve had Moo cards for years now as my personal “blogger card” and moved from the half-height ones to a full version as soon as they became available.
Recently I read on the Moo newsletter that they have been trialling NFC (Near Field Communication) business cards.
More information can be found on the Moo site
They have managed to embed a NFC chip inside a standard business card – see an example below
In addition, Moo has developed an android app that allows you to program the card to do a number of things, such as
- link to a website
- link to a map
- link to social media networks
- call a number
- create a new contact on the phone
The NFC business card in action
Shown below is the Moo NFC card in action.
You tap the NFC card on the phone, and whatever action you have programmed onto the card is executed.
As shown in the video above, in this case, the phone was told to open NFC.lc.tl, which I can redirect to anywhere I like after I have handed out the card.
I have already enthusiastically shown the card in action at networking events – explaining how it works, and there has been real interest – it is a great talking point.
While I am a card-carrying (literally now!) early adopter, the issue will be that not everyone has an NFC-capable phone. Thankfully, both my main phones (Blackberry 9900 and HTC One X) have NFC built-in.
This means though that in the short term, if I hand out a NFC card, only those of my contacts with really new phones are likely to be able to read the card, meaning I probably won’t NFC enable all my cards in the next print run.
Great initiative from Moo and I can’t wait to get my real cards printed with NFC inside.