I’ve been using the new 2.0 version, which adds a number of functions that will make it very useful for web workers. The contact information to be shared is shared as a profile, which is based on the data about you that you’ve probably already added to your contact list, but which can be edited. You can also create more than one profile, so you can easily choose what information you wish to share.

In addition, Bump 2.0 allows you to automatically connect with others on Facebook and LinkedIn, and follow others on Twitter. It’s possible to share contact details in only one direction if desired. You can also share photos, other people’s contact information, compare calendars and send invites. There’s also a chat function for communicating with people you’ve “bumped” in the past, although I haven’t tried this yet.

According to Bump’s FAQ, it requires that both phones have an active Internet connection, since it “matches” the two phones that are connecting through the cloud. You may also want to check Bump’s privacy policy.

The free Bump app is available for the iPhone, iPod touch, iPad and Android, and the developers say that other mobile platforms are on the way. And yes, it’s possible for an iPhone user to connect with an Android user. There’s also an API, which will enable users to do things like send money via PayPal just by bumping phones.

Of course, the idea of sharing contacts wirelessly isn’t new. I seem to recall that my old Palm PDA had a similar function. But the 2.0 version of Bump is pretty slick, and it will be quite useful once it becomes popular.

What apps do you use to swap contact details?

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There are other things you can do, things that are far more representative of your trade than a lifeless rectangular slip of paper with some contact information printed upon it. That’s not to say that all rectangular slips of paper are without merit, just that most traditional ones just aren’t getting the job done like they used to, following the demise of the Rolodex. Here are some alternatives you may want to consider.

Email/Blog Address Fortune

Maybe I just have a lot of superstitious friends with hoarding tendencies, but I, and people I know, tend to hang on to the fortunes we get from fortune cookies at Chinese restaurants. At least until the next time I wash the pants I’m wearing, at which point I empty out the pockets and re-read said fortune.

Lucky Brand jeans uses this as a marketing tactic, and includes a branded fortune in the pocket of a new pair of its product. You can do the same. Find a memorable quote or write an interesting fortune, print them on slips of paper with your logo if you have one, and put an email or blog address on the back. Handing these out will not only help you network, it should spark conversation, so long as the content you print on them is interesting enough. Try to come up with a variety so that you can hand them out in groups without doubling up.

QR Code

Depending on the crowd you’re mixing with, and whose attention you want to attract, you might want to riff on the traditional business card by handing out cards printed with QR codes. QR codes are a type of barcode that can be used to link to digital content via a scanned, printed symbol. Here’s an example:

QR codes can be scanned by software readers on smart phones with cameras (as long as there’s an app available for the phone, which there often is) and will process the information and launch the appropriate content. For example, the one above should open a link to WebWorkerDaily. You can generate your own QR codes here.

Obviously, you have to be careful who you give this kind of thing to. It works best with tech professionals who’ll either be familiar with QR codes, or with tech enthusiasts who’ll be interested enough to find out more about them.

Contact Info T-Shirt

If you’re going to a trade show or convention, and you aren’t afraid to do a little shameless self-promotion (which you really shouldn’t be if you’re in this line of business), then have a t-shirt printed up with either your email or web address on it.

Now that cell phone cameras are so prevalent it’s unlikely you’ll come across someone who doesn’t have one, all you have to do to share your info with someone is stand very still for a couple seconds while they snap a photo. It’s memorable, it’s environmentally-friendly, and you get to feel like a rock star for a day while getting your picture taken.

Business Rock

This isn’t mine, it’s something I found on Instructables, but it was so off-beat that I had to share. Basically, the idea is just that you find a well-worn lake or river stone, hand-write your details on it, and distribute that in lieu of a business card.

It’s time consuming, sure, but it doesn’t cost a thing, and it will help you stand out from the field, especially if you work in a creative line of business. You can pick up a relatively inexpensive customizable craft stamp if you’d rather simplify and save your hand some cramping, too.

It’s a little out of left field, but maybe in your line of work, that’s seen as a good place to be coming from.

Let’s face it. The business card isn’t useful. It’s a little like wearing a hat in public. An odd tradition left over from a bygone era that evokes some nostalgia, but that’s about it. You don’t have to start carrying around a sack of rocks, necessarily, but try and shake things up a bit, and your business relationships will benefit.

What business card alternatives do you use or have you come across and thought about using? Any tangible benefits to do doing things differently?

Photo credit: bargainmoose

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After signing up, you have three options for adding the VisitorContact form to your site. The first is copying and pasting some generated JavaScript into your site’s code. When visitors click the button, they’ll receive the popup form as the next image shows.

If you don’t want to use the JavaScript method, you can use an iframe. This just pastes the entire form into the page, without using the button.

The third and final method is a WordPress plugin that works like the JavaScript method, except you don’t have to copy and paste the code (Disclosure: WordPress is a product of Automattic, a company that is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True Ventures). You just upload the plugin, activate it and enter the form ID provided by the VisitorContact web site.

As you can see in the image above, the contact form displays your basic contact information, address, Twitter and Skype IDs. You can choose to publish all or some of this information. If you include your address, the contact form displays a Google Map pointing out your location. You can customize the form using VisitorContact’s design options and change the background color, hover color and screen placement of the form to match your site’s theme.

VisitorContact also has an autoresponder option that will send an acknowledgment email to any visitor who uses your contact form. It’s an opportunity to connect, send a “thank you” gift, or simply let the sender know the form reached you.

You can edit your forms through VisitorContact’s simple dashboard, which also gives you access to the JavaScript embed codes  and the list of recent contacts (without email addresses).

After your form has received 50 messages, you can export the data containing contact names and email addresses. Until you reach the magic number of 50, you can only view an online list with names, location and the form name.

When a visitor emails you through the form, you’ll receive a simple email complete with their details, including IP address, as the next screenshot shows:

VisitorContact is a good option for quickly adding contact details to a site and works well, with one exception. If a visitor makes a mistake entering the spam-protecting CAPTCHA code, the contents of the form are wiped, meaning they’ll have to start over. I think the information in the form should stay put to avoid aggravating users.

How do you include contact information on your site?

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Sure, checking-in ticks all the boxes you’d expect: it helps me build client relationships, ensures I don’t miss any project developments I need to know about, and can help with problem solving. But it achieves two other goals that are equally as important, if not more so.

First, it helps remind your client that you’re there. It doesn’t just remind them you’re alive, or that you’re actually doing work. Checking in once a day gives you the opportunity to discuss the sorts of smaller issues that you might not actually set down in email. It gives clients insight into how you work, what thoughts you’re having about different aspects of their projects, and how you might be of value to them in other ways, or on other jobs.

The other benefit of the check-in is that it reminds you that your client is there — that you’re not alone if you face hurdles, need advice or assistance, or want someone to bounce ideas off. I find that working remotely can lead to a sort of “must resolve everything myself” mindset. Whether that means scouring forums for solutions, or brainstorming my own ideas, it doesn’t encourage me to seek advice from the client. And often it’s turned out that, had I asked the client first, the issue would have been resolved much more swiftly, if not more effectively.

A quick IM or call to let the client know where I’m at, or what I’ve been thinking about their project, can often lead to the discussion of factors that I wouldn’t otherwise have gleaned. Last week, while chatting socially with a client about the news headlines, she remembered she’d seen an article that, while not directly related to her company, had a strong bearing on the amount and type of media interest likely to arise around the project I was working on. If I hadn’t called to check in, she might not have thought to mention it to me at all.

But even if every check-in contact doesn’t lead to exciting new discoveries, it usually leaves me with a sense of purpose for my work on the project, and for the day ahead, and makes me feel I’ve reinvested myself with the client — that I’m part of their team, rather than an outsider.

Have you checked in with your client today?

Image by stock.xchng user clix

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Chi.mp gives you a web site to consolidate your contact info and blog/social network content in one convenient location, at a unique URL within the “.mp” top-level domain. It’s a new service, and they’ve only just opened up registration, so you might still be able to sign up and get “yourname.mp” (I snagged darrelletherington.mp). It also serves as an OpenID provider, so you can use your Chi.mp account to sign into other sites that use OpenID. A free domain including a site that requires no HTML knowledge struck me as a fairly attractive package.

Your Chi.mp site is divided into “Profile Items” and “Content Items.” Under the Profile Items tab, you can enter contact information, employment history, education details and more biographical information. Think of it as a plug-and-play web-based CV, complete with links to our work online and an integrated portfolio.

In your Content Items, you can import contacts, updates and other info from a number of popular web services. You can also publish status updates to Facebook and Twitter from directly within Chi.mp, and choose to display your Twitter stream on your profile. All together, thanks to Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and Hotmail support, most people should be able to aggregate a fairly comprehensive address book through Chi.mp with little trouble. Unfortunately, it’s missing the option to import contacts from Facebook, which would make it a lot more useful.

All of your imported contacts are stored in your “Ultimate Black Book” located under your Contacts tab. You can add new contacts and edit existing contacts from this page as well. You can also tag contacts for easy searching and grouping, and merge the duplicates that are bound to occur if you’re importing from a variety of address books. Chi.mp helpfully auto-detects duplicate contacts.

Like Facebook, Chi.mp offers you the ability to control the level of access people have to your profile. It does so through “Personas,” which are divided in to three categories. You have “Public,” “Work” and “Friends” Personas, each of which can be customized completely according to your taste.

Aside from integrating many outside services, Chi.mp also offers its own blogging and photo uploading features. These are very nice features to have if you’d like your Chi.mp profile ito be the go-to spot for all your online activity. Chi.mp’s blogging service is rudimentary, but completely adequate for most people’s usage. It works like Posterous and other mini-blogging services, giving you just the basics without the non-essential frills of more complete blogging systems.

In addition to offering customizable content and service integration, Chi.mp also gives you some control over your site’s look and feel. Design options include the ability to choose from a number of pre-set themes, and you can even design your own (limited) theme from scratch if you feel so inclined. You can also add your very own favicon, which many comparable services don’t allow.

It’s a very impressive service overall, and clearly designed to be completely user-oriented. You can even export your entire site with the click of a button, which includes your contacts as a vCard file, your blog posts as HTML, and more. Best of all, it’s completely free. Web workers could definitely do much worse for a comprehensive identity management platform.

What do you use for online identity management?

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CloudContacts, a startup aiming to make the information stranded on business cards more accessible, added a new service to its offering this week.

While they may seem archaic, business cards are still the de facto way of sharing contact information. After attending a conference or event I usually have quite a few of them tucked away in my pockets. Extracting that information accurately into my contact manager after the event, however, is a real chore. CloudContacts already offers a pretty innovative service that involves mailing in those business cards you have cluttering up your desk. CloudContacts enters the data on the cards to its online contact management service, which then allows you to export the information to your email app, CRM system or contact manager.

The new service enables you to submit your cards via email. You simply take a snap of the business card with the camera on your phone, email it to the service (via a unique email address generated for your account, similar to the way that TwitPic works) and the information on the card is extracted added to your CloudContacts contact manager.

I tried the system out with a couple of cards and it worked well. Getting a decent snap of one of the cards with my iPhone’s camera proved pretty difficult as it had a small font and a low-contrast combination of black text on a blue background. I managed to get an OK picture but thought that it might cause some problems for CloudContacts as the text was very hard to read in the photo. Not so — CloudContacts captured all of the information from the card perfectly, which was impressive.

A contact's details page

A third card, one of those tiny MOO mini-cards that are popular with folks working on the web, proved impossible to photograph properly with my iPhone’s camera; the text was simply too small.

The CloudContacts contact management app is straightforward, though it has a couple of nice frills including automatically pulling in a Google Map and Twitter widget (if a Twitter username is present) into your contacts’ details pages. It makes it easy to export your contact data into a number of different file formats for import to your favorite email app or contacts manager.

Pricing starts at $4.95 per month for up to 20 cards. For large quantities of cards, it would be less hassle to use the CloudContacts mail-in service; CloudContacts view email subscription as a good way to “top up” your card contacts, rather than a way to input lots of cards.

CloudContacts pitches this service as more accurate and less hassle than business card scanning hardware. Having never used a business card scanner, I can’t attest to that, but with business card scanners costing upwards of $150, the pricing is reasonable.

How do you get business card data into your contacts manager?

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