Poken: A paper-free business card, free at GHC!

Wow. I mean, WOW.

I just learned about Poken, thanks to a tweet about it being at GHC this year. Not to sound like an advertisement, but it sounds really awesome! It's a paper-free business card that works with anyone else who also has a poken. You apparently touch the two together and it exchanges your contact information. When you set up your account you can choose what information to share and what social networking sites to include.

This sounds like a great idea for a conference, especially as they are giving them free to students and $15 for non-students. This sounds much better than the CONNECT project in 2008, where we had to find a CONNECT person to connect us. This year we'll be able to connect digitally without having to go somewhere else first! Conference organizers really seemed to have listened to our complaints and found a potentially perfect solution.

I think it's still worth bringing regular business cards though. Not everyone will have a poken, and not everyone will set it up either. But this product could really be revolutionary! It's much harder to lose digital information than a little piece of paper (at least, if it's stored somewhere easy to access and organized). It would be great if eventually everyone just had one and it could completely replace business cards. That could take awhile though. I'd like to say it would be more environmentally friendly, but the environmental cost of manufacturing the things may outweigh the paper savings (especially with recycled paper and properly harvested forests).

Well, I'm looking forward to trying out this new technology at GHC this year, and maybe it'll become mainstream enough that soon I can use it elsewhere too! I can't believe I never heard of it, but then again it looks like it may have only come out about a year ago, so I don't feel too bad. Hopefully I'll have a good experience to report!