We live in an era of digital communication whether it’s spoken or written. Then why is it so that we still exchange business cards and look for elegant business card holders on e-commerce sites? Why are we contributing to rapid deforestation?
Moreover, this is happening when all of us carry the most revolutionary gift of the technology – smartphone or similar portable device in our hands all times. Maybe, it’s high time that we simply need to kill this custom of sharing business cards in its physical form and make more use of digital business card apps.
Keeping Multiple Business Cards
The leading app stores are full of smart business card scanning applications including ABBYY, CamCard, ScanBizCard and Adobe Scan. Though each of one of them offers options to fill in standard contact details manually or automatically using OCR (Optical Character Recognition), they lack customization feature. Along with this, both the business card sender and the recipient must have the same digital business card app installed on their smartphones.
At the same time, nowadays, people work in different organizations at a single time or handle multiple roles in the same office. For this, they may keep multiple phone numbers and e-mail IDs with respect to their various work profiles. Additionally, the contact details now consist of multiple social media accounts – a personal page or company page, blog info, etc. And people may choose to share select contact information with respect to change in context or person.
For instance, individuals could hold a separate card for professional purpose, another for personal connections and one for those recipients whom they don’t want to connect through phones.
And this is where the existing digital business card sharing apps still lag behind. There is a huge void to fill in here. We need a smart app to share customized contact details without much hustle.
Thanks to Manu Kumar, founder of K9 Ventures, who along with his team, has taken up this issue into his own hands.
Screenshot of two types of contact details of a single person. Source: HiHello
A New App to Share Contact Details
All-new app dubbed HiHello is taking an aim at sharing contact details digitally by providing customization facility. The digital business card app is available for iOS and Android platforms.
Manu Kumar and Hari Ravi co-founded HiHello Inc. to develop good communication tools for optimizing professional relationships. Kumar said,“Who you know, is often more important than what you know.”
Kumar saw a loophole in digital business card sharing apps a decade ago. Back in 2009, he had endeavored to develop the CardMunch app to store business contacts digitally. The app was then acquired by LinkedIn in 2011 but it was eventually shut down because the acquirer company could not see much potential.
The HiHello app covers all the features to address issues discussed earlier. It allows users to store digital multiple business cards with different information on them, appropriate for sending to the people from diverse profiles.
They can easily share all the digital contact cards via e-mail or text message and that too without revealing the phone numbers attached to their smartphones.
One can also share the contact details using a secure code. For those on iOS v11 or a higher version, the business card receivers require their inbuilt iOS camera app. On the other side, the Android recipient will require a QR code scanner, a feature available in Google Assistant and Google Lens.
Lastly, with multiple digital business cards on the phone, the sender may get confused which one has got what information. For this, the iOS and Android widgets for HiHello app will let the users choose a suitable business card they want to share right from the smartphone’s lock screen.