[HN Gopher] The slow death of the traditional business card
___________________________________________________________________
The slow death of the traditional business card
Author : helsinkiandrew
Score : 56 points
Date : 2022-08-26 05:40 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| intothev01d wrote:
| Oh man. Patrick Bateman in shambles
| jonathankoren wrote:
| Business cards are lame.
|
| Calling cards. Now that's something to bring back.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visiting_card
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Reads like an introvert's dream:
|
| > The essential convention was that a first person would not
| expect to see a second person in the second's own home (unless
| invited or introduced) without having first left his visiting
| card at the second's home. Upon leaving the card, the first
| would not expect to be admitted initially but instead might
| receive a card at his own home in response from the second.
| This would serve as a signal that a personal visit and meeting
| at home would be welcome. On the other hand, if no card was
| forthcoming, or if a card was sent in an envelope, a personal
| visit was thereby discouraged.
|
| and also:
|
| > Sample lady's visiting card, specifying an "At Home" day
|
| > The "At Home" day was a social custom in Victorian Britain,
| where women of gentle status would receive visitors on a
| specific day of the week.
| kornhole wrote:
| I think I will opt out of the chip in my hand. I have a shortcut
| on my phone's homescreen to a QR code linking to my site with all
| my details including .vcf file.
| Hoasi wrote:
| Implanting a chip in one's hand is overkill. An NFC is just
| basically a relay antenna... you could wear it or have it
| attached to your watch or ring. When you change your address or
| business title, it's easy to update all the information. If you
| hold a chip inside your hand, you'll have to get it replaced if
| your info changes. Not the best tech choice.
| prash_ant wrote:
| Yes, overkill. But it makes headlines.
| nucleardog wrote:
| Some of them can be rewritten. If you can read it through the
| skin, you can rewrite the data through the skin. No idea how
| many times, but presumably enough to keep your
| name/title/email/phone up-to-date.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I've had business cards for decades. Still do, sitting in a
| drawer here. But I haven't actually found it useful to hand them
| out to anybody in about 10 years.
|
| If my current lifetime supply becomes obsolete, I doubt I'll
| bother getting more.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| I still love traditional business cards. It's so uncommon now,
| that Zoomers find it a novelty and I immediately come across as
| ancient (although I'm a Millennial).
|
| The cost is so minuscule, I use them almost like post-it notes,
| writing stuff down on the back for people I meet.
|
| I'm sure they mostly end up in the trash, but it does beat
| handing someone a post-it note with my email on it.
| [deleted]
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| To your point, yes they are easy to dismiss. Until that one
| time you bump into someone of substance and don't have anything
| to hand them.
|
| Biz cards are now a differentiator. For the cost, they're a no
| brainer.
| Spivak wrote:
| > but it does beat handing someone a post-it note with my email
| on it
|
| When does this ever come up? I have never once in my life ever
| felt the need to copy down a printed email, url, or phone
| number. If you're a company rep, you have a website I'll just
| Google, if you're a person you have social media or I just hand
| you my phone to enter your phone number.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| So if you're good at remembering names, that's good. If you
| want to pull your phone out and mess with it for half a
| minute (versus 3 seconds to pocket a card), then sure. For
| me, that's usually a no on both, and I think others are
| similar.
| riffic wrote:
| Look at that subtle off-white coloring. The tasteful thickness of
| it. Oh my God... _it even has a watermark._
| at_a_remove wrote:
| I ended up working in print, or I guess print-adjacent, right
| after the book came out. This scene nails the time period,
| business cards were experimented with in terms of weight (the
| thickness), being able to put watermarks on them more easily,
| and so on. Once that opened up, a period of competition
| happened and it was just as ... petty and fraught as that
| scene, as Bateman more or less holds himself together against
| forces of internal dissolution as both his taste goes
| unacknowledged _and_ he is effortlessly one-upped by Paul
| Allen, again, who isn 't even in the room.
| walrus01 wrote:
| applied to other white colored product: https://i.kym-
| cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/624/593/ac4...
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Man, now I really want a reservation at Dorsia. Gonna listen to
| some Huey Lewis on my way home.
| basementcat wrote:
| Source https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=T4UQf7zb3Pk
|
| Notice that "acquisitions" is misspelled on each card!
| pcrh wrote:
| Aquisitions!
| thejackgoode wrote:
| Came here for that. Business cards are reduced to this scene
| now.
| space_ghost wrote:
| There's a great analysis of that scene on YT:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKc54z5SsEs
| emptyparadise wrote:
| I like silly artisan business cards. It would certainly be cool
| for them to survive if only for the demo scene aspect:
|
| https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=33.%20LinuxCard
|
| https://mitxela.com/projects/stylocard
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIZMiCK1-oM
| pelagicAustral wrote:
| I know where they're not going anywhere anytime soon. I was in
| Bogota a few years back and while walking on the street, even of
| some pretty nice, absolutely not dodgy areas at all, you will be
| handed this business cards reading "CHICAS", in some streets you
| could easily collect 5. Now, I dont want to be rude and just walk
| away and leave someone with his hand extended towards me so I
| generally just took them and carried on... By the time I came
| back to my appartment it'd look like I just came back from a meet
| and greet at a strip club.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > By the time I came back to my apartment it'd look like I just
| came back from a meet and greet at a strip club.
|
| In Shanghai they would shove cards advertising prostitutes
| under the door of your apartment. You can't reject the card
| that way!
|
| (That practice may have lessened now, with prostitutes
| advertising more directly over wechat. I'm not sure.)
| upupandup wrote:
| man I'd be super careful being handed anything in Colombia.
| Scopolamine is a real danger down there.
| pelagicAustral wrote:
| Oh is it? Never heard of that. I was on a pretty nice area of
| the city for about 3 months, never had a problem. Not a
| single one. I used to stay around the 85th street and mostly
| spend my time in Polo, Chico, Castellana, Usaquen, but I was
| also keen on Chapinero and Candelaria. I felt even safer than
| at home.
| miloignis wrote:
| Wikipedia has a section on it's use in crime, but suggests
| that transdermal doses would be too small to be effective -
| ingesting it being the main attack method.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scopolamine#Crime
| upupandup wrote:
| what they do is let you get close and blow the powder in
| your face and that is enough. usually a distraction like
| they will get you to open a card and doing so it sprays the
| powder as you get close to inspect it. super scary.
| SapporoChris wrote:
| Any good evidence that it's a danger?
|
| Guardian story writes it off as a scare story without much
| basis. https://www.theguardian.com/society/shortcuts/2015/sep
| /02/de...
| vorpalhex wrote:
| OSAC issued a warning in 2012, suggesting ~30k cases a
| year.
|
| From Wikipedia:
|
| > Between 1998 and 2004, 13% of emergency-room admissions
| for "poisoning with criminal intentions" in a clinic of
| Bogota, Colombia, have been attributed to scopolamine, and
| 44% to benzodiazepines.[39] Most commonly, the person has
| been poisoned by a robber who gave the victim a
| scopolamine-laced beverage, in the hope that the victim
| would become unconscious or unable to effectively resist
| the robbery.[39]
| social_quotient wrote:
| Never heard of this till today
|
| https://video.vice.com/en_nz/video/worlds-scariest-drug-
| colo...
| cantSpellSober wrote:
| Those were cards for brothels, not strip clubs
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| https://archive.ph/yAj6C
| cafard wrote:
| I have a box old enough that it gives my email address as
| "Internet"--slightly earlier cards printed by my employer would
| have given a Compuserve email address also. It looks as I used a
| hundred or so of them, but I have no idea how.
| egberts1 wrote:
| I remember receiving a black PCB "business card" running Linux.
|
| Perhaps this
|
| https://hackaday.com/2019/12/24/now-even-your-business-card-...
| apurtbapurt wrote:
| I still prefer taking and giving traditional paper cards when
| meeting new business acqaintances. Need to order a new batch
| soon, actually.
|
| Any recomendations for high quality printing services? Preferably
| one that can do all the stuff they talk about in American Psyco!
| FabHK wrote:
| moo.com, mentioned a few times here, has decent prices and good
| options.
| dannyw wrote:
| They're great for conferences and events. I don't try to do
| anything crazy or whimsical either. Utility over novelty.
| greesil wrote:
| I 3d print mine. Tons of fun.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I carry around "Calling Cards."
|
| These are more akin to the old Victorian concept[0], than the
| modern business cards. They are quite nice, Moo.com cards. They
| have my "personal brand" on one side, and simple contact info, on
| the other.
|
| They are personal; not business (I also have business cards, but
| no one ever wants them).
|
| People seem to like them.
|
| [0] http://www.victoriana.com/Etiquette/victorianetiquette.html
| khazhoux wrote:
| Great link, thanks.
|
| I was actually talking to a guy from the late 1800s the other
| day at a dinner party, and he simply couldn't believe that we
| spend all our days ( _including early morning!_ ) on "calls"
| with co-workers, but never have a set day and time set aside
| for social calls. Truly, we lost something.
| wmeredith wrote:
| Whatever was lost is pretty easy to find. Just put some time
| on your calendar and call your friends.
| shaftway wrote:
| I finally managed to get my last name as a domain name. My
| calling cards are all letterpress (reverse embossing) and read
| "{first_name}@{last-name}.com". The twist is that first name
| and last name are black, the "@" and ".com" are struck blind
| (no ink). The result is a card that just has my name on it at
| first glance, but when you look at it you realize it's an email
| address.
|
| That's it. No phone, nothing else.
| mro_name wrote:
| that's what I did with "{first_name}@{last-name}.name" and a
| quite light grey for @ and .name.
|
| On the card are the only immutables - my name.
|
| All else has to go handwritten when handed over.
| shaftway wrote:
| Yeah, I jot notes too.
|
| Check out the letterpress idea. It's nice and subtle and
| adds a nice touch, but there is a higher setup fee. I think
| for mine it was like $100 for setup, but then typical
| prices for repeat orders.
| wollsmoth wrote:
| yep. They are perfect. Then if they decide not to contact it
| isn't weird, it's very easy to say they lost it. Then we can
| all skip the weird ritual of adding each other to our phones so
| we can not call each other.
| brtkdotse wrote:
| Does it say:
|
| sharing good books, good food and exotic music and dance
|
| _tender embraces_
|
| unusual sense of humor
| IshKebab wrote:
| Damn I had forgotten about that. Now I'll have to start
| forgetting about it all over again.
| sidpatil wrote:
| I do the same thing, and second the Moo.com recommendation. I
| splurged and got the tri-layer card for mine.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I have those (as business cards), but found people actually
| prefer the "velvet texture" ones (can't remember what Moo
| calls them).
|
| Of course, since I write Apple software, the corners are
| rounded ;).
| brk wrote:
| I use Moo as well. Did the tri-layer cards for my business
| cards, and did these velvety ones [0] for my other card, with
| spot-gloss on the back.
|
| [0]- https://imgur.com/3roJYWB
| softwaredoug wrote:
| I gave up on business cards when I realized I can send you a
| message via LinkedIn in the same time it takes to fumble for a
| card you'll probably lose.
| gav wrote:
| I was at my first post-Covid sales conference a couple of
| months ago and this is the only way that contacts was shared.
|
| I've been thinking about getting a QR code sticker that I can
| stick to my phone that has my LinkedIn url for easy adding.
| eadmund wrote:
| I never log into LinkedIn on my phone, and I would _never_ in a
| million years install their app -- OTOH it's easy enough to
| type in a LinkedIn URL when I get to my home computer and an
| isolated browser instance.
| subpixel wrote:
| I briefly worked for a company in Atlanta that made big plans
| centered around the CD-ROM business card. It didn't work out as
| planned and I recall a storage area full of those oddly shaped
| things.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Those were neat. I remember getting some piece of little
| software that came on one (pretty sure it was a driver for
| something).
| standardUser wrote:
| I exchange Instagram more than almost anything else these days.
| Second to that would be WhatsApp. Email or text would be the last
| resort. But please don't hand me an object, I have plenty and
| don't need any more.
| dhosek wrote:
| I never really knew what to do with the business cards I ended up
| with at conferences and the like.
|
| There was one time, I had about twenty or so cards and I was out
| at a bar with a college friend during the conference so I started
| going up to random people, and saying to them things like, "Dave
| Burbach, eel trainer," and handing them one of the cards I'd been
| given and walking away. They got some surrealism in their lives
| and I got rid of all the cards I'd accumulated.
| brk wrote:
| I just had to order more cards now that I am doing more in-person
| events. I have not seen any health concerns around business
| cards.
|
| I have a QR Code on the back of my card to make it easier for
| people to import the data, but IMO the physical cards are still
| highly valuable. I use them as easy reminders about who to follow
| up with after an event, or to jot a couple of notes on while
| talking.
|
| The contactless alternatives are neat, but they are always a
| hassle, IME, as the article also outlines.
| NoOneNew wrote:
| Agreed. When your job requires you to meet new people often or
| do trade shows, business cards with a qr code are the way to
| go. At one trade show I collected about 80 cards. About 10
| people had special app vcards. Each with a totally different
| app. I'm not downloading an app for your information. Give me
| the fucking piece of paper.
|
| However, pro tip. Blank back cards. People want to write notes
| about you and vice versa. Stop over designing cards with a
| back. A typical card is not a flyer. You should only hand them
| out to people you've met and talked to. That same card will
| fail as that hybrid business card/flyer. You'll never have
| enough info to justify expecting someone to go "huh, I just
| found this card somewhere without context and suddenly I'm
| compelled to talk to them".
| eropple wrote:
| My last set of cards had the QR code on the back and the rest
| of the back was ruled lines for writing on. Folks seemed to
| get a kick out of it.
| brk wrote:
| I probably need to change that. I have a logo on the back
| next to my QR code, should probably drop that for blank
| space.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| +1 for blank back and QR code. I meet a bunch of folks for a
| hobby and this has served me well.
| adrr wrote:
| Useful for dinner, networking events. Use them as source for
| their full name so i can find them on linkedin to connect and/or
| to put their info into my contacts. I never save them.
| bluedino wrote:
| My last job gave me a box of business cards that was the size of
| a brick. 500? 1000? I don't know.
|
| What was I supposed to do with them? We never met with anyone in
| person because of covid. I cut them into strips and used them to
| pick my teeth. When I left, the box was still in my desk and I
| had probably used 25 of them.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| Ha, I also once had a job which just gave me, without being
| asked, a box of business cards I never even opened. I just
| assumed that kickbacks from a printing company to a VP
| somewhere were responsible.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| I have a whole box of boxes of 1000 business cards. I never use
| more than a handful.
| mitch3x3 wrote:
| Save them for your kids so you can tell them about the wacky
| things we did in the olden days.
| convolvatron wrote:
| I used to have the opposite problem. supposed to carry around
| your cards everywhere? instant notecards. bored in a meeting?
| make a little maquette.
| Arrath wrote:
| For me my cards primary use is allowing me not to have to
| bother to memorize my work phone number.
|
| Either I give the card to someone so they have my number, or I
| always have a few at hand so I can read my number off to them.
| floren wrote:
| If somebody told me to scan their hand or their ring, I think I'd
| just refuse...
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| I ordered business cards once, mainly for the novelty. A week
| after they arrived the company changed its name!
| cryptoz wrote:
| Slightly OT: I met Kevin Mitnick at The Last HOPE in 2008 in NYC
| and got his 'business card'. The card itself is a lockpick set -
| super cool! I nearly lost it to airport security because I used
| to carry it with me everywhere (ha, just in case I need it), but
| now I keep it at home since it's too cool to risk losing.
| zumu wrote:
| No mention of Japan or Asia. Last I lived there (~10 years ago),
| business cards were an essential part of almost every business
| encounter. So, if you do business in Japan (and maybe other East
| Asian countries), you want business cards. There's all sorts of
| etiquette in how you hand them to one another, but so long as you
| keep them right side up facing your partner so they can read it,
| you're 80% of the way there.
| coldpie wrote:
| After the meeting, what do you do with the ones you received?
| pjlegato wrote:
| You're supposed to carry around a purpose-built business card
| holder case. After the meeting, you carefully place the cards
| into your case and take them with you for later reference.
| FabHK wrote:
| With both hands, of course.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-08-26 23:02 UTC)