Love’em or hate’em, despite the best efforts of Bump and others, traditional business cards aren’t going away anytime soon. At least, though, some companies are trying to bridge the gap between paper cards and efforts like Bump. New York-based Vizibility first announced its NFC-enabled businesses cards during SXSW earlier this year. Now, the online identity management platform for professionals, is ready to take this project out of beta and is making it widely available as a standard feature for its paying subscribers and for a one-time fee of $15 for users with free accounts.
With these cards, Vizibility promises, users will be able to wirelessly exchange contact information and share “hand-picked profiles, video bios, verified Google results and more.” Given that many phones, including the current generation iPhone, don’t yet support NFC, Vizibility is also printing a QR code on the front of the card as well. Vizibility users can also buy additional QR stickers and business cards and allows users to track when and where their cards were scanned.
Once scanned, the user’s browser will open up a mobile-optimized microsite with the contact’s information. The site lets you download you contact’s vCard and will also show mutual LinkedIn and Facebook friends. According to Vizibility, its cards are “the first commercially available mobile business card using QR code and NFC technologies.”
Vizibility has raised about $2.6 million since it was founded in 2009. The company’s latest funding round was a $1.3 million round last August that was led by Launchpad Venture Group of Boston.