Are printed business cards passe?

I just ordered a new set of printed business cards. Did I waste my money on this time-tested marketing and networking tool? Are they going the way of the dinosaur these days? I have noticed more and more people not having them. The LA Times wrote this week about the trend of people turning away from business cards. "Your business card is your website," one young business owner said. Read that story here.

 

But maybe the business card as we know it is just evolving. Maybe a combination of printed cards, digital cards and storage capabilities, a website and just being open to reaching people in different ways is what we all need.

 

What do you think? What kind of cards, apps or services are you using these days?

 

Today my guest columnist is Jorge Cordova of WSI Digital Experts. He explores this topic and writes about some great digital tools. His post is below:

By Jorge Cordova

 

If you worked in an office environment as recently as twenty years ago, you might remember your sense of surprise when telexes, typewriters and fax machines reached obsolescence in relatively short periods of time.

 

Could printed business cards be next?

 

Printed cards date back to the reign of Louis XIV in France. Though they remain predominant in the business world, today even the most beautifully designed business card says “old school.” If you are looking to refresh your company’s image, cater to a younger market or simply want to impress your clients, you’ll probably want to consider mobile marketing replacements for the traditional business card.

 

Here are three which I have found most popular and useful:

 

Bump. As the name implies, instead of exchanging business cards, you literally bump your smart phone with the person you want to exchange contact information with. The free app on your phone senses a bump, sends your contact data to the Bump servers in the cloud and transmits it to the phone that bumped yours. One plus is that it’s multi-platform so an iPhone could bump a Blackberry, for example.

Cloudcard. Instead of sending a digital contact, Cloudcard allows you to send a personalized iPhone or Android app to the recipient. The app icon can be your picture or company logo. Your personalized app can include your contact information, a map to your business, link to your website, and even a video. Cloudcard is not free, it is currently priced at $3.00 a month.

 

Card Munch. For those still dealing with a lot of printed business cards, this may be the best option. It is a free LinkedIn iPhone app which allows you to take a photo of the business card and it will be transcribed, associated to their LinkedIn profile and show you what connections you have in common. Unfortunately though, it’s not available for Blackberry or Android phones.

 

King Louis would be happy to know that it might be a bit early too say adieu to your paper cards, but if you are looking for a “wow” factor, there are a growing list of options at your disposal.

Jorge Cordova has worked in electronic commerce for more than 15 years and is currently a Digital Marketing Consultant for WSI Digital Experts. You can follow him on Twitter: @WSI_JCordova or contact by email jcordova@wsidigitalexperts.com.

Read more here: http://miamiherald.typepad.com/the-starting-gate/2012/03/i-just-ordered-a-new-set-of-printed-business-cards-did-i-waste-my-money-on-this-time-tested-marketing-and-networking-tool-a.html#storylink=cpy

The Cloud: Building Wealth In The New Economy

Scott Williams|theoside.info|theoside.com

If you plan on building wealth in the next decade or so chances are your going to have to do what all the wealthy people of the past have done; get ahead of the next up-and-coming economic trend. In 2011 VOIP and energy deregulation are current trends poised to create many new millionaires. In the United States alone there are 312 million people and only a bit over 20 million currently use Internet telephones known as VOIP phone systems. Energy deregulation is currently underway in the United States and the energy market is several times larger than the VOIP industry. The newly deregulated energy industry is sure to produce not merely new millionaires but also billionaires as well.

There is also a technology trend that is about to explode that has been quietly waiting for the right time to ignite. The trend I'm speaking of is what most people are now calling The Cloud. Cloud Computing is a commonly used term today but not many consumers understand the total impact it will have or has already had on their life. To fully understand cloud computing, you have to think of it in terms of jobs that it has taken away and jobs that it will create in the future.

“The Cloud” simply refers to the Internet but when you talk about “cloud computing” the word simply no longer applies. Cloud computing can be defined as what many know as utility computing or what many understand as having virtual servers at the ready over the Internet. You can also say that it is any application used outside of your local network. For instance, using MS Outlook at the workplace even though it's not actually loaded on the machines hard drive. This may be difficult for the non corporate worker to understand so let's look at some other uses of The Cloud.

Cloud Computing is all of the following:

• Face Book, Twitter
• Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo
• Automated Customer Service Telephone System
• NetFlix, Video on Demand
• Icloud, Mobile Me
• Pandora music service
• Flicker
• Travelocity, Priceline
• Google Docs, Windows Live

Lets look at NetFlix. How many Blockbuster Video retail stores have closed because of this innovation? What about Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo? The postal service is currently trying to fight off bankruptcy because standard mail service is a thing off the past. Worst of all, at least for the common worker, The Cloud allows technology companies and IT departments to increase capacity and add capabilities on the go without any major investment in new hardware, software or in the training of new personnel. Many US workers believe that we have lost our jobs to the international market and it is definitely true, we have. However, just as many if not more jobs have been lost to The Cloud. The job loss I speak about has all occurred while the majority of cloud based services are still individualized services. Imagine the impact when cloud companies around the world begin to merge and become an even more convenient array of bundled services.

When was the last time you:

• Bought a music CD
• Developed film from a camera
• Sent a letter by snail mail
• Rented an actual DVD from the store
• Spoke to a live person at the beginning of a customer service call
• Actually spoke with a person to arrange your travel
• Paid full price to use MS Office (HELLO...Open Office or Google Docs or even Windows Live)

Ok so Open Office is not really on the cloud but I'm sure it will be soon. I'm just saying, why pay all that money!

So, we've seen the jobs that The Cloud has evaporated over that past 20 years. Let's take a look at what jobs it will create. There is no doubt that cloud technology will create many new jobs. However, this new way of doing business is much more efficient than the old and we will never replace all of the jobs lost to our newly improved business model known as The Cloud. The jobs that will be created are going to be jobs requiring much more education and skill and these jobs may or may not be filled by Americans. These jobs will not require an employee to be strapped to a desk, a computer or even any particular constant location. These jobs will be knowledge based jobs requiring a high level of productivity and fresh output. The level of volatility in our future jobs market will increase as pay will go to only the brightest and best with the latest trend setting idea. Sounds a bit like the Wild Wild West. So, lets take a look at a list of the good, the bad and the ugly.

Jobs created by the cloud industry will be:

Applications

• Enterprise architects. These are people who can design cloud computing environments. Key skills include understanding cloud orchestration software stacks, application management frameworks, network designs, bandwidth latency, and a host of other things. The cloud computing environment of resources must operate in unison like an orchestra, and enterprise architects are the conductors.
• Application architects. These employees apply the cloud computing environment designed by enterprise architects to specific solutions. Key skills include appropriate partitioning of applications into RESTful interfaces, deciding which application objects need to be distributed into content delivery networks, creating business continuity and disaster recovery strategies via data center- or cloud-spanning designs, along with many other application elements.
• Storage and data architects. These workers focus on building highly-scaled, highly-distributed data and storage schemes. Calling this a NoSQL strategy is too limited. This type of architect has to account for vastly distributed data and the need for transactional events.
• Software engineers. There are a host of skills that are needed to build cloud applications. From AJAX-oriented interfaces, elastic and failure-resistant components, caching tier design, to API integration and load/performance testing, software engineering skills are crucial to cloud computing applications.

Operations

• Sysadmin 2.0. Critical skills for the systems administrator of the future are operations automation tools like Chef, Puppet and the like. Implementing monitoring systems appropriate for elastic, highly-scaled, geographically distributed applications is another Sysadmin 2.0 skill in high demand.
• Capacity planners. In a world of explosive growth, application elasticity and unforeseen demand (aka resource self-service), capacity planning moves out from a leisurely backwater to a vital organization capability. Understanding and forecasting capacity based on one's own organization as well as industry patterns based on other cloud-oriented organizations will be a skill in short supply.
• Financial analysts. The move away from quasi-monopoly, coarse-grained transfer pricing to competitive, fine-grained open market pricing associated with applications that can be migrated from one operating environment to another will require much more sophisticated financial analysis. Just as the world has many manufacturing financial analysts, we will soon have many information technology financial analysts.

As you can see, many jobs will be created. However, due to the current educational challenges in the United States, not many Americans, at the start of this trend, will be eligible for these jobs. Obtaining a Computer Engineering or Computer Science degree requires a level of math that is much higher than the common person has in the United States of America and there lies the big problem. Citizens of China and India are going to get the majority of these future jobs.

Scott Williams|www.thesode.info|www.theoside.com

Future Job data provided by: By Bernard Golden | CIO.com <http://www.cio.com/> (article posted on infoworld.com)