rmbrME blog

NY Tech Meetup - May 5

We’ll be presenting an entirely new beamME app at the New York Tech Meetup on May 5. If you happen to be in NYC, come by and check it out in person!!

NY Tech Meetup (New York, NY) - Meetup.com

If you can’t make it, don’t worry - we’ll be announcing it that day as well!

Nominated to Mobile Monday Peer Awards

rmbrME and beamME have been nominated to the prestigiuous Mobile Peer Awards - which is a very exciting honor for us.

You can see the complete list of nominees at the Mobile Peer Awards website.

Inauguration Celebration: Win a Trip For 2 from beamME

To celebrate the inauguration, we’re giving you the chance to win a trip for 2 anywhere in the US that American Airlines flies.

All you have to do is use beamME from now through the 24th of January. Every person you beam is an entry into the sweepstakes, and you can earn bonuses for fun stuff - like beaming someone named Michelle, or Barack Obama himself.

You should check out the sweeps page and carefully review the rules and regulations.You could be off to the beaches of Hawaii or the slopes of Colorado before you know it.

So get out there and meet people with the world’s most popular beaming app for the iPhone: beamME!

You Spoke: beamME 1.1 Launches

In the 6 short weeks since we launched beamME for the iPhone, tens of thousands of people from around the world are regularly sharing their electronic business cards with others, independent of phone, carrier or social network limitations. This has made beamME the most popular app of its kind.

In the process, we actively solicited – and frequently received unsolicited – feedback from our users on every conceivable topic. We heard things that were good and bad, thoughtful and off-the-cuff, and from CEOs and CSRs.   The hundreds of people who took the time to write us were pretty consistent however, laying out a crystal clear plan of how they want beamME to evolve to better meet their needs.

So we’re pleased to announce the launch of beamME 1.1 on the iTunes store (with a free update available to existing users). It’s packed full of the features you requested – and comes without the various bugs you helped find. Although we didn’t have time to put everything into this release, we’re sure you’ll appreciate the changes we’ve made – and there’s more to come!

What’s New in beamME 1.1

• Control Your Professional Message: Now you decide what message is displayed with your business card – in your own words. You can choose a default and/or customize each one if you choose.
• Send From Address Book: Choose an existing contact to send your card to with ease.
• Full Headshot Support: Choose and update your headshot anytime you like.
• Faster Beam Screen & Improved Account Options: We optimized the beam screen to give you a faster beaming experience and improved your access to account management options.
• iPod Touch Support
• Bug Fixes: We listened and fixed dozens of minor issues affecting our users

Download beamME 1.1 Today and join our community of electronic business card senders. Sending your vCard to someone’s phone has never been easier.

A Digital Business Card Design Manifesto

Many people have asked about the philosophy behind beamME’s universal business card exchangedesign. While some business card exchange applications (especially for the iPhone) have focused on “gimmicky” features, like shaking devices in midair or using WiFi to exchange contact info, we’ve taken a vastly different approach. beamME relies on SMS, email and the web to ensure delivery of exchanged cards. While our process does insert an extra step for some users, it eliminates significant hurdles for the vast majority to adopt digital cards.

Although we often discuss this design philosophy in our industry presentations, we though it would be interesting to share it with the broader community and have a dialogue about it.

Here then is a design manifesto for digital business card exchange that we’d summarize as:

1. No Recipient Downloads/Logins
2. No Device Restrictions
3. No Carrier, Social Network Limitations

Or, put another way – Support Sender Ignorance

*A brief note: throughout this design discussion, we’ll use the word “sender” to refer to someone who sends a digital business card, and “recipient” for someone who receives the sender’s card.

1. No Recipient Software Downloads
When we set out to design rmbrME and beamME we realized that for the first few years of use, the majority of people in the world would have no idea who we were, or how to use a digital business card.  By extension, digital card recipients would be unlikely to have our software on their phone the first time they were beamed a card by one of our senders. We also realized that if recipients needed to have software or an account before they could use a card, it would severely discourage the distribution of digital cards.

So our first rule became pretty obvious – both for usability and viral distribution reasons: recipients need no software downloads or account/login details to retrieve a card.

2. No Device Restrictions
While many beaming solutions have existed in recent memory – not the least of which was the Palm’s – they have all suffered from one seemingly insurmountable problem: external incompatibility. Since the advent of the iPhone, this problem has only gotten worse, with nearly a dozen applications for “sharing”, but almost all of them restricted to iPhone-iPhone transfers. With RIM’s huge lead in smartphones, Motorola/Nokia’s in traditional phones (dumbphones?), and an ever-increasing range of viable entrants (Apple, Google, Microsoft, Palm 4.0) you can’t build a solution that only works on a single platform and expect it to be usable.

From a standards viewpoint, it seems that email + vCard should be a sufficient panacea. After all, smartphones all have email – most can export, and most people have an account – even if offline.  However, vCard has not been implemented uniformly, resulting in a huge failure rate for device-device transfers, and most of the traditional phone user base has no email access on their device.

This analysis became the origin of our second rule: a viable solution must work between any two devices.

3. No Carrier/Social Network Limitations
While it’s possible to add someone to Facebook directly from your iPhone or to send them a LinkedIn invitation from m.linkedin.com in realtime, the process is fundamentally clunky. Not only do you need to fire up the respective application or (gulp!) WAP page over EDGE, but you then need to authenticate, navigate, and obtain a contact point from the user that corresponds to one already in their profile. Moreover, it requires you to negotiate a social network up front – putting people at odds if they don’t like to use Facebook for business or LinkedIn for social contacts…worse yet if it’s Orkut you prefer. It goes without saying that limiting users to a specific carrier would be crazy – but just in case someone from Verizon or Sprint is listening – I thought it worthwhile to make the point more clearly: don’t do it.

Bringing us to rule #3: If you need to negotiate the social network or carrier before being able to use a business card beaming solution, it’s DOA.

And when taken together, it became obvious that we could unify our perspective on designing an effective electronic business card solution under a single golden rule:

The sender of an electronic business card must never have to think about the device, carrier, social network or software status of his/her recipient.

That is to say, like a paper business card – if you can read it, you can parse and add it to your address book. After all, paper card buyers rarely have to worry about fundamental legibility; whether M or C represents the mobile number is a minor concern compared to the digital compatibility gauntlet.

While reaching a similar bar is a challenge for a digital business card solution like beamME, it’s one we take seriously.