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"Doing the Bump at SXSW: A new app is trying to send all those little pieces of paper to the recycling bin.\nBy Caroline Waxler, contributor\n\n  \nOne of the first pieces of advice given to anyone who goes to the South by Southwest interactive conference in Austin is bring enough business cards. And don&amp;#8217;t be surprised when you run out.\nNot this year.\nAt the 2010 conference, exchanging physical cards (remember those little rectangular things?) has become analog to using last year\u2019s anything. Instead, people are going paperless, mostly &amp;#8220;Bumping.&amp;#8221; That is, using the iPhone application Bump in a kind of fist-bump move (with an iPhone or Google Android in hand) to exchange contact information.\n\nFrom there your mobile network provider reports in the exchange to Bump HQ whose algorithms are looking at every Bump to match the two phones which Bumped at the same time in the same location. It also lets you instantaneously to send a Facebook Friend request, if you want.\nBump launched last March and has now had over ten million downloads. At the conference to promote the app, Bump cofounder Jake Mintz, says he doesn\u2019t have any Austin-specfic data available, but that tens of thousands of Bumps have taken place worldwide since the conference began.\u00A0 Click here for a Bump-tracker\u00A0 (and here for Foursquare and Gowalla check-ins).\n\u201CI\u2019ve met just as many people as in past years, but have exchanged much fewer cards,\u201D says Maya Baratz, product manager at MTV. \u201CMy pile has waned significantly.\u201D (I, myself, gave out a fraction of the cards I brought.)\n\u201CI remember contemplating purchasing a business card scanner a few years ago because I&amp;#8217;d get so many cards at conferences. I&amp;#8217;d say of the hundreds of cards you can collect, only ten or fifteen I actually enter into my computer contacts,\u201D says media blogger Irene McGee of No One\u2019s Listening.\nSays Pandora CTO Tom Conrad, \u201C&amp;#8221;When I need a business card, they&amp;#8217;re almost always at work in a desk drawer. On the other hand, I always have my iPhone, so with Bump I can instantly share my contact info or find a common friend.&amp;#8221;\nBump is far from the only player in its virtual space. The South by Southwest organizers, for example, put a quick response code technology on attendees\u2019 badges that can be scanned if you have the right device on your phone. Once scanned it connects you to your page on the SXSW site. \u201CIt\u2019s another way to foster community,\u201D says SXSW producer O\u2019Keefe. For a community that likes to geek out, what could be geekier than that?\nBut not everyone is getting into it. \u201CJust like no one pokes me on Facebook, no one has offered to bump me, but that is more of a reflection of me,\u201D says Jacob Lewis, founder of Figment, a mobile platform for reading and writing young adult fiction. Indeed, it may be used as a cutesy way to talk to strangers. \u201CThere are some people who play up the sexual innuendos,\u201D says Bump\u2019s Mintz.\u00A0 \u201CIt can be fun. Someone came up to me last night and said, \u2018I\u2019ll never forget the first time I was Bumped.\u2019\u201D\nThe money guys at this conference aren\u2019t big on Bumping. \u201CI\u2019m on a Blackberry so I can\u2019t Bump,\u201D says Simi Blaustein, IAC\u2019s director of strategic planning and M&amp;amp;A, who instead gave me his card. (Bump\u2019s Mintz says he is working on Blackberry but doesn&amp;#8217;t have an estimated release date.)\nRichard Moross, CEO of Moo.com, which lets users take images to make business cards, says that he has actually seen an uptick in business this year. \u201CSome of the emerging virtual business card ideas are great, but they universally lack one critical ingredient: personality. Form is still just as important as function these days. A virtual business card is just data.\u201D Moross hinted that his company may be figuring out a way to make the virtual business card space much better looking.\nTrends at SXSW tend to spread. Many great technologies start out as toys, which people initially dismiss to later embrace. Bump could well fall into that camp. And people have been calling for the end of business cards for the last ten years, but now finally feels like the right time. Or close to now.\n\u201CAs far as the digital data exchanges here at SXSW, almost all of the Bumps I witnessed experienced total technology fails and ended with the people resorting to the old analog method,\u201D says influential blogger Cathy Brooks of Other Than That.\nIndeed, phone networks have issues that can derail the process just as phone calls can get dropped. So what did I resort to when my iPhone wasn\u2019t working and my contacts didn\u2019t have business cards? The very, very retro pen and paper."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://fortune.com/2010/03/16/the-death-of-business-cards-2/>