This is cool as it showcases his embedded engineering prowess.
Years of startup meets[1] have left a bad taste in mouth for the business cards. I've seen people exchange business cards ceremoniously, only to give a missed call to each other immediately.
Business cards are a waste of money, paper and I don't want to get started on the plastics. I honestly thought that proliferation of NFC in smartphones would help to change this behaviour, but with Google shutting down Android Beam(its reasoning: no one is using it) and newer, cheaper smartphones without NFC; I think that ship has sailed.
At-least, in WhatsApp countries; people share contacts via WhatsApp.
I find that business cards are still helpful to get the spelling of people's names right - otherwise you have to either hand your phone over to the other person and have them type their name into your phone, or at least have them text you the spelling, which can be awkward to ask for and anyway has more friction than accepting a business card.
Also, sharing WhatsApp contacts makes me uncomfortable. There's various fields that people can store in their private contacts system which is inappropriate to share without permission - birthdays and home addresses at least. When you share a contact, you have to remember to sanitize the contact before you send it. A business card only consists of details which are pre-approved to share with strangers, so business cards don't have this problem.
One more concern for me is the utility of a business card is just once, if you want to contact them in future you'll store the details on your phone and when you put the card in the pocket it likely directly ends in the trash.
As for WhatsApp or other chat app 'contact' sharing it is not limited to business/professionals and so it has become a norm in several countries.
Yeah, I don’t really get the practice of sharing contact cards with people. A coworker sent me his once and now I have the names of his family members, his birthday, and home address.
On android, Google lens in pixel can do it and few other manufacturers like OnePlus have deeper integration with Google Lens via their camera app but needs to be installed separately.
I support the idea of having built-in barcode reader which can scan barcode from the screen as well e.g. images in webpage.
Actual card exchanges seem to be used as a polite way to fob uninteresting people off as much as an actual exchange of contact info with people you want to talk to later.
This seems to be a bit of an exception. They're not really expensive, but they are expensive enough that you're not going to just hand them out to random annoying recruiters or wantrepreneuers you want to fob off.
Years of startup meets[1] have left a bad taste in mouth for the business cards. I've seen people exchange business cards ceremoniously, only to give a missed call to each other immediately.
Business cards are a waste of money, paper and I don't want to get started on the plastics. I honestly thought that proliferation of NFC in smartphones would help to change this behaviour, but with Google shutting down Android Beam(its reasoning: no one is using it) and newer, cheaper smartphones without NFC; I think that ship has sailed.
At-least, in WhatsApp countries; people share contacts via WhatsApp.
[1]https://hitstartup.com/honest-startup-meet/