A few weeks ago,while I was getting ready to go out to MWC, I posted a picture of my quite snazzy business cards. I was quite surprised by the response I got, it was not people wanting to stalk me or other nasty and sordid things like that, no. It was from a company called Screentag who were telling me that business cards were very old school.
So, I replied and a few tweets later we were able to arrange for the me Leigh and James to all get a sample of the QR Codes for the duration of MWC 15.
So what exactly is Screentag?
I am sure that you are all aware of QR Codes and what they can do. If any of you previously owned a Blackberry device then you will be very familiar with the next bit. Screentag will put all your contact info into that QR code which is then stored on a server,. That will then upload that information to the cloud when requested. It is then plucked from the cloud onto the phone of the person whom you are exchanging content with. In theory all the other person has to do is to then scan the QR code and then “boom”, your contact info is on their phone.
So we all loaded the Screentag image that we had been sent from the developers and we hit the show floor. This is where we encountered our first issue. At MWC, the biggest collection of mobile players in the world, people don’t seem to have QR Readers on their phones.
I managed to get about 3 people to actually use the system and they all thought it was very clever however, a physical business card still proved to be more useful for them.
I can see some great potential in this service but it is dependent on people using an older style of technology. Most Android and Windows devices now sport NFC, and I think this is where Screentag need to take the service going forward. The developers will be adding a SMS fallback to allow the details to be sent that way. This is something that will be coming very soon.
Currently this solution is looking for funding through Indiegogo so, if you think it is something that would be useful, check it out here
Thanks again to the guys at Screentag for letting us test this out.