CD-Rom Business Cards. Huh?

By | December 17, 2003

I know I may be missing something here, but what is this all about business cards on a CD Rom? Newsweek reports increased sales of these things — either full size or credit card sized and shaped — which people hand out at trade shows: “General consensus in the biz world: why spring for color brochures at $5 a pop when CD cards average a buck each? For much more cash—$3,000—New York’s HYLife Productions can squeeze up to eight minutes of video on its cards.”

I have to say I have enough problems with real business cards that aren’t the right shape or where the text is the wrong way up. Out here in Asia these small CD sized name cards came and went — at least in my line of work — a few years back, and I’m pretty sorry to hear that they may be making a comeback. First off, how exactly is 100 MB of Flash really going to help? And if the ones I received are anything to go by, folk would usually jazz up even the most basic contact details with fancy graphics so you could forget about simply copying and pasting the salient details into Outlook. Sorry but I’d rather the guy say ‘Here’s my name card but I’ll email you my vCard”. Or “Are you all Bluetoothed up? Let me beam it to you now.” Or, if you like the guy and want to make a firm commitment, ask him: “Are you on Plaxo?”

Sure, I can understand the use of CD-Roms to hand out data about reunions, parties and whatnot, but most folk who would know what to do with that sort of thing are wired, so why not email it to them? I already have way too many CD-Roms in my den; the last thing I want is funny shaped ones to add to them.

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