One of the biggest pain in the butt after an exciting conference/workshop/meeting is inputing all your fresh new contacts business cards info into your digital mail/phonebook. This is a problem. An unsolved one too.

Another problem, is that you don't know who, from the meeting, after you gave them your contact, actually checked you out afterwards. You can't tell how many checked on you neither.

Here's an elegant and smart solution to alleviate this problem, provided it gets widely adopted. I'm sharing the concept in this old blog because I got increasingly positive feedback from friends, family and business contacts. Hopefully, maybe you'll experience it too.

It uses moo cards, the new goo.gl url shortener and url tracking service, a QR-code and the google profile web-site.

The idea is to hard link your google profile vanity page into your business card, with a QR-code, through the goo.gl shortener service, and then track the hits you get. It's very simple.


Here's how I implemented it (costing me a total of around 40$ for 100 business cards). I used moo minicards - I just *love* moo cards -.

  1. Shorten the url to your google profile using the new goo.gl service.(Look for the goo.gl chrome extension).
  2. Click on the "details" link from your goo.gl dashboard.
  3. Save the black&white image, encoding the goo.gl short url, - it's called a QR-code -.
  4. Import, select and crop facebook photos for the special 100 moo facebook minicards, using the moo web-site interface. Use these photos for the moo cards flip-side.
  5. On the front-side, jot down your contact and upload the QR-code image on the mug-shot holder.
  6. Complete the order and wait a couple of days until you receive your brand new moo minicards :)
  7. To test the solution, download a qr-code scanner for your smartphone (I use the free app neo-reader for iphone 3G) and try it out on your moo cards.
  8. After you offer your freshly baked cards to your contacts, check out the impact on the goo.gl analytics site.

A few comments: Actually, I edited the qr-code image and added the shortened url in arial fonts for manual input (as not everyone I know owns a smartphone *with* a barcode-scanner). At the time I did this (more than 6 months ago), the goo.gl service didn't have analytics and the mobile version of the google profile didn't exist yet. Finally, I used the google charts api to generate the QR-code image. Fortunately, all these services significantly improved to help this business card with hard-link solution.

It works great! Every time I demo it people look very interested and ask me more about the qr-code image. The only turn off is that, under dim lighting, the iphone 3G camera makes it hard for the qr-code scanner to detect the link, and it can take up to 20 seconds of waiting. But under natural daylight, it works in a split second!

Do you have any similar experience with your business cards? Would you care to share it here?
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Below is a screenshot of the most interesting article of 2013, period. Written by one the most-influentials "good" guys of world, Julian Assange. The article deals about the promiscuity between Google top-notch executives and the White House, and how it affects both institutions policies, at the expense of the people's freedom and will. Below the article I share with you some notes I've taken.

Assange sums it all up to us in two words: "Jared Cohen", and a question "Who is he? ". It's worth it to check him out. I googled him to find out he's a futurist thinker, thinking about the disruptive reach social networks and, now, context networks can attain, world-domination-wise. A megalomaniac thinker surely, with the wits, the will, the intuition, the perception and the goal.

Back in 2005 I was really excited about the web2.0 concepts, the web-based APIs, mashups, and all the new publishing tools that was later to be known by 2008 as "social-media". However, back then, it really wasn't the modern facebook-ish "social-media" model that was tingling my neurones; it was rather the emergent nature of these disruptive new tools such as blogs, wikis and web-based productivity apps such as Google Docs or Zoho.
1

Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook ... what is the REAL future of computing, as seen from 2010?

I don't know, exactly. In my last post I simply summed up Google to an advertisement company and Apple to a leisure-time company. And indeed, I still think it is what they are, and what they focus first to become, consciously.

Somebody wrote a while ago:

Google is an advertising company that builds popular services that command large audiences.

To which I add:

Apple is a leisure company that builds popular media-platforms that command large audiences of media-consumers.

And, to my insistence, beyond games/apps, music, movies, tv-shows, books and magazines, Apple will try hard to become a vacations, travel and experiences re-seller. It's the natural next-step for them ...

I just got accepted to the most awesome workshop in the whole world, organized right here in Lisbon, the Codebits 2010, promoted by sapo.pt,

I'll be staying three days, in a row, in a big room packed with free wifi and free cable net access, unlimited free pizza, free cokes, free chocolate bars and a horde of PT finest geeks. I'll participate and assist to the biggest festival of creativity in PT geekdom. Missed it last year.

One of the biggest pain in the butt after an exciting conference/workshop/meeting is inputing all your fresh new contacts business cards info into your digital mail/phonebook. This is a problem. An unsolved one too.

Another problem, is that you don't know who, from the meeting, after you gave them your contact, actually checked you out afterwards. You can't tell how many checked on you neither.

Here's an elegant and smart solution to alleviate this problem, provided it gets widely adopted.

Android is for tasks, life-hacks, body-hacks, and Chrome is for organized data, information.

At some point in the foreseeable future I expect to see an elegant merger where a next-gen browser will be the sole platform. But first, the life/body-hacks platform will need to walk the walk it has to walk, and I expect it to be, at least, a five-years march.

Hello all, it's been a while since my last post. These last months were spent mostly dedicated to finish my unfinished thesis - Ever heard of PhD comics? No? Well, it works better than Dilbert for me. Here's a nice one ...
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