Most business cards end up in the recycle bin or tucked away in a drawer, discarded and forgotten. That's why there have been some creative attempts at making business cards more interesting, like the playable Tetris business card. The latest shot at a smart business card has appeared on Kickstarter in the form of the SwivelCard.
SwivelCard combines a printed USB drive with a normal business card. The card folds up to fit into a USB port and directs the recipient to open a Web page. That page can be changed after the fact, so you could hand a prospective client a business card that leads to your main website and then go in and have that particular card direct to a specific product page instead.
Related stories Yep, it's playable Tetris on a business card Findables case turns your entire smartphone into a business card Moo goes wireless with NFC-enabled business cardsThe USB drive has less than 1 megabyte of storage and is read-only to prevent someone from changing the information on your card and handing it off to someone else. Each card has a unique ID. It appears on a user's computer like any other mass-storage USB drive. A QR code on the back lets users with mobile devices connect to the website without needing a USB port. Some of the cards also support NFC, depending on which pledge level you select.
It took less than eight hours for SwivelCard to hit its $10,000 goal and it's now over $40,000 in pledges with 29 days to go. You can test out the tech for a $29 pledge, which gets you 10 mini cards. There's no room for your contact information, but the cards can be redirected just like full-size SwivelCards. Moving up to the big cards will cost you $319 for a set of 200. The NFC-enabled cards run $379 for 200.
The team behind SwivelCard is working on improving an analytics component that can track cards as to their location and the times when the cards are used. The cards themselves are nifty enough to stand out from the crowd of normal, lifeless business cards, but the cost of buying them might make you think twice before handing them out to just anyone.
