And with the IP law conferences come business cards. Piles of them.

I have ultimately solved the problem with the business cards. I use my smartphone to take photos of them after the conference, and I use the free Online software Camcard to automatically recognize them and to store them online. Please watch the courses no. 5 and 6 of my free CRM course here https://ip-lawyer-tools.com/course/clients-relationship-management/ if you want to find out how that works in practice.

What makes a Good Business Card

What characterizes a good business card is that it can be easily read and found again by the recipient.

Full stop.

What is irrelevant for a business card is whether you or someone else finds it fancy and whether it carries ALL possibly relevant information about your business.

What makes a Business Card useful for the Recipient

The following features make a business card useful for networking:

• use a large and straight font that is easy to read
• less information provides more value for the recipient
• use only one single side of the business card for your information
• use paper on which you can hand-write with all available pens around you
• it is white, with crisp dark letters on it
• it has a dull, non-glossy surface
• it successfully tests under OCR with CamCard

Why such a Business Card is Good

By doing so, you make it easy for the recipient:

• to take handwritten notes on the business card
• to take a photo of the business card that captures the entire text on it, without parts of the text covered by bright light reflections, and
• you make sure that the entire information on the business card is converted into the OCR database of the recipient

That will make sure that you finally end up in your meeting partners` CRM database system, so that he can find your contact details when he is looking for someone like you.

Here is a Photo of my Own Business Card

I have taken the above photo under normal daylight conditions.

A test shows that despite the bad light, OCR successfully captures the four most important pieces of information: “Singapore”, “Germany”, “Patent”, and “Trademark”.

That piece of information is what people are looking for when they have a problem.

And here is the entire information that CamCard has recognized from my card, it is all there:

Just one minor thing: CamCard has wrongly recognized our general incoming office email address “office@trademarks-patents.com.sg” on my business card as “office@trademarkspatents.com.sg”, without the dash. That does not cause harm as we also have connected this Internet domain and email address.

(In a sideline only: I never give out my personal email address on my business card, in order to keep my inbox clean.)

And this is the same business card after scribbling on it with 10 different pens and pencils. About 8 of them worked well, which is not bad.

This little experiment shows you that there is always room for improvement. But I can tell you that it is very difficult to find a carton for business cards that accepts all pens equally good.

And this is a photo of the same business card under bright cloudless equator sunlight, 12:00 noon Singapore time:

You can see the hard black shadow of my hand at the lower right corner of the business card photo. Some of the handwritings on it glare in the bright sunlight, but the surface of my business card does not glare at all.

This means that I am ready to go for my next IP law convention.

Call to Action

1. Take out your own business card and try to apply a handwritten note on it, with 10 different pens and pencils.

2. Take a photo of your business card under normal light conditions and upload the photo to CamCard. Then check what information on your business card is recognized and converted into the CamCard database.

3. Take a photo of your business card under very bright light conditions and check whether parts of the text are covered by light reflections.