Making Business Cards Useful

We’ve all been in this situation; have a pile of business cards from people we’ve met and have to get the contact info into our database. What a pain!

Here at Winco, we are trying to make that a little easier for people by making our business cards a little intelligent, with the use of 2D barcoding – heck, we are a barcode company after all!

At first we experimented with QR Codes, for which there are some good solutions, but ended up using Microsoft’s Tag system. On the Tag Website, it was a simple matter to set up a contact Tag for each of our team members

One of the features I really like with Tag is that the barcodes produced by the system lend themselves to just about unlimited customization. We played around a bit and ended up embedding our Tag into the WincoID logo which we print on the rear of our cards.

Making up the customized logos with the output form the Microsoft site isn’t too user friendly (we had to dust off our rarely used copies of Adobe Illustrator) but we were able to come up with a process for doing this.

So now, when we give someone one  of our cards, the receiver just has to scan the tag with the free app from Microsoft (go to your SmartPhone’s app store to get it)

Here you can see the result of scanning my card using the Tag iPhone app. To capture the contact info, I’d just have to click on the “Add to contacts” button.

Because I sync my phone to my Google account, I now have the contact info everywhere I need it with just about no effort – I like that!

Oh, on the Microsoft Tag front, the Tag team just announced that the system will now also support QR Codes (if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em!) and  NFC (Near Field Communication – a flavor of RFID) as well.

How can barcodes and labeling help make life easier for you? Inovative barcode solutions is what we do so feel free to contact me – you can scan the Tag on my business card photo!