Near Field Communications (NFC) & Holographic Business Cards

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The inventions and products featured on these pages were chosen either for their uniqueness in the RF engineering realm, or are simply awesome (or ridiculous) enough to warrant an appearance.

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NFC sitck-on tag (BigDawgs) - RF Cafe

You can also buy a stick-on NFC tag to attach to just about anything - great for promotional gear.

For not an awful lot of money (about $1.50 each) you can buy business cards that have an NFC (near field communications) antenna and chip built in that will transfer your selected information to an associate's cellphone or tablet computer. Bump your card on someone's phone and have it connect to your LinkedIn or Facebook page, go to your website and/or have a bookmark added, open an e-mail with your address already typed in, have a digital version of your business card appear, download an app, or open a video chat. Each company has its own variety of functions available. This would be great for personal business use of for your company to hand out at trade shows.

A nice feature of the NFC business card is that you can update it online with new information and functionality to reflect contact changes or just about anything that comes as part of the original design package. Many manufacturers provide the capability to monitor the usage of your NFC business card to track how many times it has been accessed, from what location, by whom, and which features were used. I did not find any information suggesting that there is an additional charge for this service, so be sure to ask the vendor.

The companies listed below, BigDawg and MOO, seem to be a couple of the largest players in the NFC business card market, but there are others. Both places provide a short video demonstrating the process. You can design your card entirely from scratch or use one of the provided templates.

As of this writing, apparently just about every major smartphone manufacturer except Apple support NFC tags. Apple only uses NFC to allow members of its congregation to make purchases from the Apple Pay system.

BigDawgs - NFC Business Cards MOO - NFC Business Cards

While on the subject of cool business cards, I also saw customizable holographic business cards. It would be slick to use a design with a Smith Chart showing a two-step impedance match or maybe a spectrum analyzer display with and without a filter installed. BTW, the industry term for holographic printing is "4D lenticular printing;" in fact, do your search on "lenticular business card."

PrintBrook - Holographic Business Cards PrintDirtCheap - Holographic Business Cards

 

 

Posted on April 8, 2016