As I start my new freelance career, I’m beginning to plan the different tools and equipment I need.

I’ll soon be attending a workshop for freelancers in the publishing industry (The ELT Freelancers’ Awayday) and suddenly wondered if I need business cards to take with me and hand out to contacts. Do people still use them or have they been replaced by some fancy digital version or even just a quick sharing of your contact details by text or email?

I remember trying to use Bump a while back, but the person you wanted to exchange details with had to also have the app for it to work, so it ended up being quicker to email the details. I just checked their website and it seems others found it equally useless as the product is no longer available.

After a quick search I found a nice-looking alternative.

Haystack seemed interesting as it removes the requirement for the other person to have the same app. It has a simple interface for designing your own business card: you can add a photo, company logo (which it finds on the internet if it recognises your company), and all the contact details you want to share, such as LinkedIn profile, Twitter, Facebook, Skype, website, etc.

You can tap the share button and choose the app you want to send it through: message, email, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, etc.

I tried sharing by text and email which produced a message with a link. If you have Haystack installed, the link will open in the app itself and display and store the card there (you can also download it from there to your standard Contacts app). If you don’t have the app, it’ll open in your browser and give you the option to open the card to display the details or download it as a vCard (which, again, opens in Contacts), so all fairly straightforward. It also brings up a dialog box allowing you to send your own details in return.

Finally, there’s one more feature in the app: a card scanner, which uses the phone camera to scan a printed business card and, through OCR (Optical Character Recognition), it’ll save the details on the card to the different contact fields. This could be a nice feature and time-saving if you come back from a work do with a stack of cards but it was only partially successful in recognising the different details and needed a fair amount of editing.

I like Haystack, but I’m not sure it has many advantages over you creating a new contact in your phone with all your business information and sharing that the usual way. I hadn’t noticed before that on your regular Contacts you can add social profiles such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, Myspace (really?) and Sina Wiebo (a new one for me – I’ll have to google) as Contact fields, as well as instant messaging details for Skype or Facebook Messenger, so it’s worth creating a new contact for yourself that includes all this business information.

I discussed it with colleagues and it seems people in publishing still love paper and nice designs too much to completely forego real business cards. Going through them later to enter the details into your Contacts gives you the chance to email the person to say hi and initiate contact. It seems there’s also a fear that if the technology fails you at that moment it might lead to some awkwardness – no one wants to look digitally-inept precisely at the time when you’re trying to make a good impression.

In the end I decided to have some printed  and do a combination of digital and print at my next conference. For print, I’ve always liked Moo designs – and you get 10% off if you follow this link: https://www.moo.com/share/9z6qsk  I’ll let you know how it goes.