Electronic Eco Business Card: Poken

Not everybody has heard of Pokens yet. So what are they? They are tiny USB devices that help you exchange contact information easily. You can exchange information such as mobile phone numbers, email, blog, website addresses, and social networking sites you belong to. You simply rub your poken with another and your information is exchanged. They are often designed cutely as little dolls or animals but their designs can be elegant or business like too.

In other words pokens could replace business cards. That sounds good doesn’t it? I remember throughout my adult life how many boxes of business cards I have tossed out because that little business I started just didn’t pan out. Sometimes it is because I changed careers such as when I moved up from being a tutor to being a full time teacher. At other times it is moving, I have moved and all the contact information has changed. Collecting business cards from others has been a nuisance too. I collect hundreds of business cards and it gets overwhelming. It takes time to organize them and most often I simply throw them away because I didn't have the time. 

I am one individual and I really am not an extensive business card user. Imagine the amount of paper that is going to be saved if most people started using poken instead. Think of all those businesses large and small and how dependent they are on business cards. Think of the humangus amount of paper used to meet the need for business cards by them. You can imagine how many trees we are going to save even if only some of them used poken instead of the traditional business cards.

With poken you eliminate all the above problems. You collect your contact information on the USB device and plug it into your computer, an icon appears on your desk top. You click on the icon and you are transported straight to the poken website at doyoupoken.com. There you have your own page where you store all your contacts. You then can add the new contacts you have collected. The computer organizes it for you according to the date you collected the information as well as alphabetically. If you changed your mind about someone having your information, there is a function that you can use that will make it invisible. You choose whatever information you want to share. So it is secure and your privacy is protected. 

There is good news and that is businesses are starting to use it and they are finding it very useful in many ways. Big companies such as BMW are getting the poken people to design pokens with the company logo on them. At conferences and workshops they usually give free pokens to help participant net work with each other. Customers of BMW are also given a poken Which they use to collect information about the cars. So they get a cute little BMW pokens instead of pages and pages of information they never read.

There is one slight problem and that is in order for it to work, everybody or at least a lot of people has to have poken too. But the way things are going it may not be a problem for long. They seem to be catching on very well. I do think they beat regular business cards by far. Maybe a better idea will be to include this feature on cell phones.But until that happens I think pokens are the electronic eco business cards of the time.