Tag Archives: Location

A Smarter Way To Network

swivelCard

Most business cards end up in the trash or stored in a drawer, becoming forgotten in an instant. This has resulted in a number of creative attempts to innovate this networking utility in ways that will make them more effective.

Introducing swivelCard, the latest product in this space, which integrates a printed USB drive with a regular business card. When folded up and inserted into a USB port, it directs the recipient to open a web page. What’s cool is, that site address can be changed after the fact, so you could hand a prospective client a business card that leads to your homepage and, subsequently, have that particular card navigate to a different page instead.

swivelCards can also be tracked as to their location and the times when the cards are used. In addition to standing out from the crowd of normal business cards, you can give your swivelCard with pictures, videos and presentations for the anyone to check out. Plus, analytics through a back-end software interface will allow you to access helpful information about your cards and how they are being used.

What Sparks Our Fire: A business card that people will actually remember, keep and use

What information would you share on your swivelCard?

Precise Location

This may be a bit too much…

Social media is an important facet of our daily lives, but the trick to putting it to good use is to find the right balance between what you share and what you don’t share. Companies and brands should share everything they want their customers to know. Normal, everyday users should be a little more judicious.

That’s why Facebook’s new tool may be sharing too much. On Thursday, the social media giant will launch “Nearby Friends”, a feature of their app that will allow you to broadcast your exact location to all your friends. Your precise coordinates will be available to anyone who has also opted into this entirely voluntary service.

Turn-On-Nearby-Friends-11

The purported purpose of this service is to help users engage in real life, offline. As with the rest of Facebook, the privacy settings can be customized to your liking, sharing what you like with whom you like. However, this leads into the realm of oversharing. For the most part, I don’t want to know where my high school classmates are, and if I did I’d ask them where they are. In my profile, this feature will probably collect dust, rarely if ever used.

But then what if it becomes a trend to have this feature activated? Because then Facebook knows where you are at all times. And are we sure we can trust these large entities with the minutiae of our daily comings and goings? It’s a small measure of privacy to be sure, but a valuable one as well. Time will tell how this feature will end up shaping the user experience.

What Sparks Our Fire: Awareness of the coming trends, and taking care not to share too much.

Do you feel comfortable with this new feature?