Imagine you’re at an industry event — say, a check-out-our-new-office party for that trendy startup — and you meet someone who’s just dying to stay in touch with you.

What do you do? Exchange business cards? LOL, sure thing, Grandpa Joe! No one has business cards at this party, and you didn’t want to incite mockery by bringing yours. Ok, how about Bump? Not everyone’s got that app, unfortunately.

Then, the new mystery person plunges her hand into a voluminous purse and hands you a one-inch cube of hard plastic. It’s got some contact information; it looks cute, like something you’d try to move around in a video game.

You eyeball it suspiciously as your new contact gushes about how quirky it is and tells you about CallingCube, the company that makes it. She tells you she got 80 for $300 and isn’t that a better deal than Moo cards, which people just forget and throw away anyway?

You turn it over in your hand. It’s solid green, engraved in black with a phone number and name. As you roll it around in your palm, you also see a simple logo on one of its sides. It reminds you a lot of a die; you start to wonder how you could make a drinking game out of it.

Your new friend says something about how you’re not supposed to get the cube wet and then mills off in someone else’s direction.

You have to admit, the cube is unique. It’s noticeable, and it would stand out in a stack of business cards, for sure. So you go to put it in your…

Purse? Pocket? Where are you gonna put this thing? It’s small, but it’s still too big to go in a wallet. You think again about the person who gave it to you and decide that since you don’t have a concrete reason to stay in touch, the cube will have to be a sad casualty of cocktail party networking. You snap a photograph of the email adress side of the cube and glance around surreptitiously before sliding the cube under a small, crumpled napkin.

A couple months later, you’re cleaning out your phone’s photo gallery. You barely think twice before deleting the picture of the cube.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Business cards are objects increasingly out-of-place in our technology-focused times. But don’t tell that to Moo, which is working on a way to keep business cards relevant by combining them with near-field communications (NFC).

With their internal NFC antennas, Moo’s new business cards can be programmed to link to webpages, portfolios, business information, or even just contact details. Others can then access the data just by tapping the cards to their cell phones.

Sounds good, but there’s one big problem: Most phones (including the iPhone) don’t support NFC, which means that Moo faces an uphill struggle with its new product out of the gate. (It’s probably a good thing the company doesn’t plan to sell these until early next year.)

While the use of NFC is new for Moo, combining business cards with a new bit of technology isn’t. The company already offers QR code-equipped business cards that work in a similar way to their newer NFC counterparts. But like NFC, QR codes have yet to really take off.

Still, it’s not hard to envision a time when an NFC business card would link to, say, a Flavors.me page.

Here’s the big question: With cellphones now near-ubiquitous, why even bother with business cards?

Photo: Moo

Custom business card printer Moo.com is stepping further into the digital age with the purchase profiles site Flavors.me.

While the two companies seem like they’re playing different ballgames, both are heavily invested in not only personal branding but design as well.

Exact details of the deal weren’t disclosed, but the big number to know is 500,000, which is the amount of users Flavors.me had at last count. That’s an important number, as it instantly gives Moo.com a major foothold in the increasingly significant industry of online identity.

Moo.com has been lucky so far in that it’s somehow managed to avoid the doom-and-gloom that industry watchers have predicted for not just business cards but print as a whole. So while buying Flavors.me is not an admission of the weakness in the Moo.com business model, it’s clearly an attempt by Moo.com to diversify its revenue stream.

The biggest competitor to Flavors.me — and the one that Moo.com has now inherited — is About.me, the profile site that AOL acquired in 2010 just days after its launch.

Photo: Flickr/MCL Abigail

Startup Paperhater is hoping to cut down on the amount of paper and business cards you’ve got piled on your desk. Using an iPhone camera, the company’s app takes pictures of paper and deciphers the text from the image.

Any office worker will tell you that paper clutter can easily overtake their desks and lives. We’ve been using scanners for several years now to covert slips of paper into digital files, but in keeping with the trend of using our smartphones to do everything, Paperhater only needs a phone camera to make a scan.

Paperhater founder Ashley Reddy

After you snap a picture, you send the information to Paperhater’s servers for processing. The information can then be sent to a contact manager app or an account executive for company expense reports. You can take a picture of a receipt, business card, or diagram and then send it via email, fax, or Paperhater’s iPhone app.

The company uses three types of technology — optical character recognition, intelligent character recognition, and intelligent mark recognition — to convert printed or handwritten text in a picture into digital text. Instead of just getting an Adobe PDF from scanning a document, the information scanned with Paperhater can be entered into address books and other form-based programs, such as expense tracking software. The technology is similar to what was used to read your Scantron sheets in college.

On stage at DEMO Spring 2012, Paperhater founder Ashley Reddy referred to the product as a SurveyMonkey for paper forms. But in an expert panel following the presentation, Climate Corporation CEO David Friedberg criticized the service for being unfocused. “There’s a lot of OCR companies out there,” he said. “I don’t see the market.”

ReadSoft and Abbyy offer software that uses the same technology as Paperhater to scan and interpret documents. Paperhater hopes to set itself apart from other services by offering lower-cost on-demand services. Paperhater’s free basic plan includes five business card and five receipt scans per month. Premium services range from $30 to $90 per month.

Founded in 2011, Paperhater is self-funded. The company has three employees is based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Reddy said that the startup is currently seeking equity funding and strategic relationships with software makers.

Paperhater is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Messy office with paper image via Shutterstock

What happens when the world’s largest social network hooks up with a beloved social business card maker? The birth of beautiful, Facebook-infused business cards.

Digital print shop Moo, long-celebrated for its ability to turn stuffy business cards into pretty conversation staters, has partnered with Facebook to bring the most picturesque part of Facebook Timeline — your cover photos, of course — to life in print form.

Moo’s Facebook Cards are personalized business cards that feature any of your Facebook Timeline Cover Photos on the front and a custom quote on the back. A set of 50 cards retails for $15 and includes as many designs as you’d like. You can also tweak the text and style of each design to your liking.

The partnership drives home the social scrapbooking side of Facebook Timeline and enables Moo.com users to share a small piece of their profiles with new contacts they encounter in the physical world.

And to celebrate the newly arranged marriage, Facebook and Moo are doling out 200,000 free sets of cards. You’ll first want to connect your Moo account to Facebook, and then navigate to your Facebook Timeline. Select “About,” scroll down to the Contact Info box and rollover the business card icon. Here you’ll see a popup window that reads, “We’ve partnered with moo.com to make it easy to print your very own set of custom business cards. The first box of cards is on us.” Click on the “Print Cards” link and you’re good to go.

Last we checked, free cards are still available, but I wouldn’t dilly-dally if you want to take advantage of the companies’ newlywed generosity.

Expanding on its printing services, Vistaprint will use Webs Inc.’s technology to offer digital marketing services to customers. Vistaprint is well known for providing business printing services, including business cards, banners and flyers. Now the company is able to offer website building services with custom text, design and domain, starting at $4.99 per month. The service is designed for customers who aren’t able to build a website on their own.

“The value of this transaction lies primarily in three areas,” Vistaprint CEO Robert Keane told VentureBeat. “An increased ability to serve customers via the integration of physical and digital small business identity and marketing, the addition of impressive talent who have an innovative and customer-centric approach to product development, and plans to monetize our mutual customer bases over the long-term via the sale of physical products and premium digital marketing subscriptions.”

The deal was initiated on December 19 and Vistaprint announced the completion of the acquisition on Thursday. Vistaprint paid $117.5 million to Webs Inc., which was comprised of $101.3 million cash and $16.2 million in restricted shares. Webs Inc.’s founders and several employees will be added to the Vistaprint team to run the new website building service. Vistaprint expects the acquisition to make the company an additional $5 million to $6 million in revenue for its 2012 fiscal year.

Vistaprint is a marketing company that offers services to micro businesses and consumers. It currently employs more than over 3,100 people and is based in the Netherlands.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Professional social network LinkedIn launched a new version of its CardMunch application for the iPhone today, which promises to help you make sense of all the people you meet during networking events.

The app allows users to take a photo of paper business cards collected from new and potential contacts. It then converts the information on the card into digital, usable text. The updated iPhone app actually takes that information and matches it with a person’s LinkedIn profile — giving you access to a their common connections, work history, education and more.

The app’s navigation has also been overhauled and split into three main screens: a card capture screen allowing you to snap a photo of a business card, a touchscreen-optimized contact list that mimics a virtual Rolodex, and a screen for each of your contact’s details and LinkedIn profiles.

CardMunch still allows for you to add business card information (and now LinkedIn info) to your iPhone address book. However, the new version also lets you add notes below each of the business cards scanned in while you wait for the card to get translated.

This is the first major upgrade of CardMunch since LinkedIn purchased the company in January 2011 for an undisclosed amount.

The move certainly makes sense for LinkedIn because it makes the company’s social network more valuable where it counts the most — in a real life business setting, where people are exchanging contact information and shaking hands.

Jonas Jager tried to reinvigorate the business card by adding presentations that include video or 3-D animations. Those presentations are uploaded the web; then the web address is converted into a QR code, a two-dimensional barcode that’s readable by mobile phones. He combined that with an augmented reality marker, which tells the phone where to place the animation, on the printed business card to create a hologram and tag with information about him. Resembling the holograms in Star Wars, Jager’s project straddles the very delicate line between really cool and a little cheesy.

For now, Jager has posted instructions on how to create your own augmented reality business card, but you need to know how to use the FLARtoolkit and other AR-related software and application programming interfaces. Jager says he’s looking at adding other features and finding ways to make this useful for average businesspeople.

I’ve posted Jager’s video demo below, followed by an older example of an augmented reality business card from U.K. interaction designer James Alliban is below:

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=5651466&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1

Augmented Business Card from jonas on Vimeo.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=4979525&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1

AR Business Card from James Alliban on Vimeo.