rmbrME blog

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.

beamME for iPhone Launches - NYTimes and Apple/Start

It has been a whirlwind few days!

As many of you know, we launched beamME for iPhone and iPod Touch over the weekend, and the response has been nothing short of astonishing. Literally, thousands of people are joining us every day; one person a second, sometimes more. This powerful, free, beautifully designed app has taken folks by storm.

And, we’ve been deluged with positive feedback - some of it on the iTunes store, some sent directly to our customer service department. We’re going to try our best to compile the feedback and make it available on the site.

In the meantime, however, we wanted to share a couple of other fun moments in rmbrME. We were profiled in the New York Times through VentureBeat - a fairly rare occurence for an iPhone app.

And - in another short-succession coup, Apple itself put beamME on its startpage. You can see an archived version of it in the photo below (as it will probably not be there for long) or click here to view it in full glory.

In the meantime, thanks for making beamME such a runaway success - we continue to focus on making this experience as seamless and exciting as possible.

If you have any support questions for beamME, please visit our beamME FAQ and support pages.

Bootstrapp(er)ing, Winning an Award

A couple of weeks ago, we were fortunate to be selected by the Bootstrapper folks to present at their inaugural NYC startup venture event.

Richie Hecker, the event’s helmsman did a great job of assembling an interesting group of presenting startups and funders. We got up, did a 7 minute pitch, and got some great feedback/questions and interest from the folks assembled there.

Even more importantly, it gave us a chance to meet a group of funders, interesting folks and startup founders that we otherwise might not have been exposed to.

Winning a Prize was also awesome, as we were chosen the favorite of the mobile track and the Producers’ themselves. Pretty cool, huh?

They are doing another event next April, which will undoubtedly feature even more exciting and dynamic startups from the region and beyond. Although we’re likely to be past this point by then, I hope to stay involved.

Congrats, Richie et al!

rmbrME for Conferences Announced

Today marks the official unveiling of a program we’ve been working on for some time: rmbrME for Conferences. You can read our press release here. We’re starting off publicly with four great events as partners, and we’ll have plenty more to announce in the coming weeks - so stay tuned.

As anyone who has gone to a conference can tell you, there are many ways that events could be greener and more mobile-friendly than they are now. In particular, we’re keen to see the elimination of giant piles of business cards - and the ridiculous post-conference effort that scanning them takes.

Moreover, our conference pals are super excited to leverage the work we’ve done and the extremely powerful force of rmbrME. That’s both a great validation of our work and an exciting way forward.

If you want to get more information about how rmbrME can help your event, check out our burgeoning rmbrME for Events Page.

I Guess rmbrME is Controversial..at Techcrunch

Jason Kincaid at TechCrunch today posted a fun article on the topic of why the business card needs to die, and how rmbrME is leading the charge for a paper-free, socially-connected bzCard-y future. Jason certainly agrees with our basic premise, makes some minor factual errors, but generally gets the story right. We’ll be waiting for the cell manufacturers to agree on a standard. :)

In the meantime, do you have an opinion? If so, check out the article and leave your comments - or write them in here.

Pay especially close attention to the photo of Mike Arrington’s drawer. He gets it. :)

-G