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".
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.
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
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.

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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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.
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 ...
The ipad is probably more expensive than the Chrome OS... but the browser experience is better, much better. I'm bending towards buying an iPad for my mom, so that she'll start using a computer, finally! She bought a laptop because she wanted to get in touch with her kids and friends through gmail.
My mom sure could use one of those Google PCs.

She's a veteran school teacher. She doesn't like using computers and hates the fact that she has to configure them for the wifi connection.
Update: if you want to check out what is cloud-computing in a secured sandboxed environment please follow this link.

When I first started this blog, I wanted to make a statement about my vision regarding the future of computing. I called this new thing the webtop. That was back in 2006.
Hi, I'm testing a javascript based syntax highlighter for this blog.
Google just launched earlier this week the new google mobile app with voice search. Now, we always went extatic in this blog, whenever a new web-based app with text-to-voice or voice-to-text features would come around.
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