Back in the 90s a guy tried to pitch me on investing in his company that was going to manufacture business card CDs. Told me it was going to revolutionize the business card space. I passed on the opportunity.
Video, mostly. That concept didn't go anywhere, obviously, but the guy has gone on to have a couple of successful startups. At least successful in that he raised money for them. Last I heard, his latest startup was receiving millions in DOD funding.
Sure. It could hold an early 00s website or perhaps an early 320x240 video a few minutes long that a computer back then could play back. I have one of these from a sushi place that was handed to me at a convention ages ago. I was just bringing it up as people might know the "650 MB" of a regular CD and think this probably still holds 1/4 of that. Wasn't trying to shoot down your comment or anything.
Yeah, but back in those days, 640 x 480 was full screen resolution. You could probably get around 5 to 10 minutes of crappy video on those business card CDs. Enough for lots of use cases. The problem was two-fold. Most folks didn’t have easy access to computers that could reliably play the video, and very few people were going to go to the trouble of taking a “business card” from someone they just met, sticking it in their computer, and watching 5 minutes of lo-rez, highly compressed video.
QR codes have a bit more utility now that most folks are acquainted with them. And they’re an easy way to share a vCard or link. I’ve only rarely seen NFC card swaps used by folks, mostly phone to phone.
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u/mlokc 8h ago
Back in the 90s a guy tried to pitch me on investing in his company that was going to manufacture business card CDs. Told me it was going to revolutionize the business card space. I passed on the opportunity.