Best mobile web browser.

From an implementation perspective, I would implement this using the motion sensor on the phones and use that to trigger a Bluetooth ID transmission. The user would have to double tap their phone against each other. The double tapping would allow each phone to measure the time between the taps. When the double tap is detected, the phones will send out their own business card along with the time between taps as measured by the phone. The receiving phone will then use compare that information with the time it measured itself. If the match is close enough, they know to read and store the business card.

Not only would this approach be new and innovative, I think it is intuitive and fun

The idea could be expanded to sharing all kinds of information between phones – triggered by the double tapping against each others phones.

All Nokia phones support business card transfer over SMS or bluetooth. I have countless times been asked for contact information where I was either close or distant. Most times I use SMS transfer and I never wanted anything else.

As Peter Drucker said “For new technology to replace old, it has to have at least ten
times the benefit.”

Downloading an app, persuading people you don’t know to do the same, then holding iPhone together to connect is all just so much more cumbersome than simply handing over your card.

Chris Hopkinson
DubMeNow
chris@dubmenow.com

The business apps for iPhone are crap. All of them. Every single one.

They all require both parties to have an iPhone, which in my last 4 months of having an iPhone has happened to me once at a meeting.

Anyone heard of 2D barcodes?

The iPhone is useless as a business tool.

Apple need to allow people to beam VCARD’s via BLUETOOTH (sorry but look up the bluetooth history before that we had Ir beaming in palms… its good and has security and auto-negotiation built in apple has it but only for some reason uses it for bluetooth headsets…)

its a STANDARD every other phone works this way if your a iPhone user you are well living in the dark ages when it comes to this functionality…

apple could if they where smart simply add nice photo’s and formatting but… this is apple

wait until they catch up…

regards

John Jones

p.s. I have been thinking about doing my own app to achieve exactly this functionality but time restraints…

http://www.johnjones.me.uk

As the CEO of beamME – the world’s most popular contact exchange app for the iPhone ( http://tinyurl.com/Get-BeamME ) I’m clearly a bit biased – but I believe in a different fundamental design philosophy for mobile social exchange:

1. The sender of a digital card must not need any knowledge of the recipient’s device
2. The recipient must not need to have special hardware, software or an account to receive a card
3. The solution must be device, social network and carrier independent

I’ve written about this topic on our beamME blog at blog.rmbrme.com – and happy to talk to anyone about it, if you’re interested.

Separately, if you’re heading to MacWorld this week, we’re running a fun contest giving away a trip to Hawaii just for using beamME. Check out the contest and rules+regs at http://rmbrme.com/m/macworld

-Gabe

And I agree someone needs to kill business cards. The Palm Pilot was supposed to do that — remember transferring your “business card” via infrared port? But that never took off. Maybe this has a better chance.

Though the little iPhone speaker probably isn’t capable of inaudible tones (20k+ Mhz). Which is fine – personally I like the tone