Friday, August 16, 2019

Business cards are dead

Yeah, I'm equally surprised to get to know this. It will be quite disheartening to learn that business cards were no longer useful - A sad story!

I was at TESTCON 2019 Bangalore on Test Automation. It was a premium software testing conference organised by Clavent Technologies.

Many CEO's, entrepreneurs, limelight testers across the globe volunteered to confer with budding testers. Testers from various organizations like Accenture, Microsoft, Hotstar, Techmahindra, Comcast India, CSS Crop, GE, Qapitol QA, Matryxsoft Tech, WinVinaya Infosystems, Taqanal Energy, Xebia, Author Renu, Moolya Testing & AppAchhi spoke so well at the conference. It was indeed a great conference. I was very happy to confer with interesting people post conference during break time, as well. That's when I got introduced myself to participants who attended the conference. Luckily I had carried my business card so I gave it to couple of participants who attended the conference. It was all good until I saw my own business card in the dustbin :(

I always love carrying business cards in my wallet. Needless to say it was an amazingly designed business card. I was told that business cards are essential tool for marketing. If so, then why it was not noticed? was it so ugly? to get thrown in dustbin?

Why my business card failed to grab attention? It definitely informs others who am I? What do I do? How I can be of help? How can someone contact me? I was pondering why there is no life in printed paper cards? Just because it doesn't have life in it, people throw away? here is the untold story of business card which reveals the truth...

The Untold Story
27 million business cards printed daily turns into just under 10,000,000,000 business cards printed annually. How many business cards are thrown out within a week? Of the 10 billion cards printed each year, 8 billion is being tossed within a week. That's 88% of the cards printed. Wow, isn't it an amazing statistics?

What can we do differently?
This made us to keep thinking on what can we do differently such that we give life to printed cards? as Arthur C. Clarke rightly quoted any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Augmented Reality is one such magical technology. We thought AR could help us to make use of useless business card useful.

AR business card is Born
At Augray Inc, a group of engineers teamed together to do differently. Suresh Thankavel is the ideation brain behind the successful AR business card. Jothieswaran and his creative team executed the idea with Swaminathan A and his technology team - Congratulations.

You can customize your persona. Isn't that interesting? We imagined how it would be to add our sales representative voice, his intended message to our clients, his appearance in the form of 3D avatar with and the way he pose and express with voice modulation. Yes, our imagination was limitless. You know what? we made that in real too :)

Watch out for AR Business Card we developed at Augray Inc. All you have to do is scan the business card using Augray app and experience the magic. The same has been recorded in a video and displayed below for you to understand. We would love to hear what you think. Lets discuss in comment section.


Regards,

No comments:

Post a Comment