Markzware’s Card.ly electronic business card for embedding on web sites, email signatures or social network pages (Get your own here):

Profile: http://card.ly/markzware

I learned of this via a Tweet on Twitter from @Minervity and a nice article or post from Bit Rebels, titled, “Create your Online Business Card!” Got to thinking though, this is not really a business card, but more a subset of social networking or perhaps even a network of itself. Enter printing…

What is cool, is step 3 when setting up your “hub” as they call it, which is where you choose a design. (Interesting choice for words, not an electronic business card, as we have reported on before as well.) Now look at that printing company down below the preview. Moo.com, who we just discussed in our last post, pushing the “real thing” a printed business card to compliment your electronic one!:

In the past we looked at BusinessCards2.0 (digital business cards) and some seem to question how long the printed business card will stay around. Well, here is one case in point to just show that high-quality, full-color, printed business cards are not going anywhere fast; as a matter of a fact, a lot goes into the IP (Intellectual Property) and overall design in the branding process as well:

Merrill Bull Returns to Business Cards

Former Merrill Lynch investment bankers won a major concession from Bank of America Corp., as it agreed to reverse a decision preventing them from using the old Merrill bull logo on their business cards.
See full source article here: http://online.wsj.com/

Did you know Markzware can preflight your business card designs to ensure a proper and desired result? And we can convert and extract them as well! And staying within the focus of this post, here was a related link which was neat:

40+ Creative Business Card Designs that will Inspire You

I read an interesting article on MarketWatch.com some time back (Digital business cards move networking off paper) proposing that traditional business cards may be under threat from some new kids on the block – digital business cards and their associated networking services. Check out mine from BusinessCard2.com:

Yes, my BusinessCard2 card would look nice on my email attachment and handy for social networking, Tweets and the likes. But… yes, the but word; how about at a trade show? What about in the elevator? Or at my boys football (yes, soccer) matches?

There is work being done where these can be zapped from one cell phone to the next. But till all cell phones can communicate equally, the printer need not worry about printed business cards with fancy color graphics, maybe even made with Publisher software (!), going anywhere, anytime, soon.

This said, Stephen Beals gave us some stark warnings in this recent post, titled, “Don’t be too Certain About Print’s Future“…  Read more... (256 words, 1 image, estimated 1:01 mins reading time)