Ian Bell, a local entrepreneur and founder of RosterBot.com, recently wrote a humorous yet informative piece on the necessity of Business Cards at Networking Events. It was entitled, appropriately enough, “On Business Cards.”
If you haven’t read it, you should read it.
My favourite part is at the end, when he writes:
“If I really needed to kill a bunch of trees so that people remembered me, then I would think that my time would probably be better spent looking for more ways to be memorable to the people I met in conference lobbies than in designing the perfect business card in Palatino font on imported off-white 25g weight stock. Advice which strikes fear into the hearts of Kinkos managers everywhere, I am sure.”
I followed up with my comments describing a similar situation I experienced recently:
I was at VEF Momentum last night and, like you, brought no business cards with me. Whenever I was asked if I had a card, I would feel very embarrassed, make up some lame excuse, then in a last minute plug, point to my name tag and say, “Wait! Jon Chui, can you remember that? If you can, just remember jonchui.com!”
Hardly orthodox, yet surprisingly effective. I saw a noticeably increase in my site visits from the normal few (my mom, my sister, my wife, etc) to more than double that. Of course, it could just be a coincidence (or my mom, sister and wife checking twice).
But now, after reading your blog, I’m feeling a bit better about not having a business card.
And yet, after having said all that… I really wish I had some business cards that night. The reason? There were some people I really wanted to follow up with myself and having their business cards in front of me made it much easier to do so. I wonder how many people thought the same of me?
On more vain side, I met the founder and CEO of blastramp and his card looked very cool:
I still wasn’t sure what the company does even after talking to him about it for five minutes. But darn, that’s a nice business card.
There website’s even better.
Jon Chui 
I get annoyed every time I align myself with a new organization they try and give me new cards.
But in all honesty you need cards. Actually you need to give people a way to follow up with you. If you have something new and magical and much better than cards then I’m all ears- otherwise chop down the trees!
I’m beginning to agree with you that you need cards. I was at BCTIA’s impact series tonight and the same thing happened where I had no cards to give others. So now I will have to do the following up.
But that’s okay.
Anyone interested in designing really cool cards for me? And by really cool, I mean like blastramp! (in the picture above)
here’s a company that has a new “magical” way: http://deets.me/