Do Business cards still make sense?

A business card from 1895. Surprisingly, they haven't evolved much

The past week I was in the Hyderabad Startup Saturday meetup, a monthly gathering organized by HeadStart. Bumping into some interesting folks, I was networking and exchanging business cards. But all through, I had this awkward feeling of practicing an anachronistic custom, not very different from dispatching a snail mail postcard in the internet age. That made we wonder whether business cards had outlived their once-useful lifespan?

Let's face it. We use cards to exchange contact details, and what do they generally contain? Name, role, phone, email, website and maybe a couple of social profile handles. But, when was the last time you wrote down a mobile number from a friend and keyed it into your phone manually? How much more awkward it can get to key in a twitter handle from the card?

Agreed, cards help register one's name and role, as a supplement to the spoken word. In some occasions, they can be useful icebreakers to strike up conversations. And, there is always the possibility to impress with an unconventional design. 

But these aren't reasons enough to keep business cards, which are actually vestiges of the erstwhile corporate era, on ventilator-support. Yes, there have been barcode incorporated cards and other digital embellishments on a physical card, but these solutions are akin to taping a brick-phone from the 90s with a GPS navigator device, on its rear.

Lets think up some alternate possibilities. What if we can enable digital-handshake by letting people wave off their mobile phones, to automatically exchange a profile brief and all their social handles (perhaps even contextually deciding whether to share Linkedin/Twitter handle with a professional contact or Facebook/Instagram profile with a friend). The person can then choose to glance at the profile brief on mobile and then with a single click add the shared contacts to all relevant platforms.

Atleast, this would help save the hassle of printing and maintaining currency of a physical business card. And it will definitely do away the awkwardness of reaching out into one's pocket to pull out a piece of paper for networking.

PS: At the time of posting, I did a quick check on prevalent apps that address this problem. There seem to be some action over the past few years, and a few of them seem to be catching up. But, the final word from several experts is that physical cards are giving a tough fight, and they just refuse to roll up and die!