Card.ly Lets You Create Cool Online Business Cards In A Matter Of Minutes
Inspired by the look of the personal web page of interface designer Tim Van Damme, the team over at Harkness Labs set out to build a service where people can easily add their online profiles, pick a theme and create a good-looking online mini business card of their own in just a couple of minutes. Having lots of experience with quickly setting up and launching light-weight Web services (check out the CrunchBase profile for the company’s founder Daniel Blake for a list of other projects), it didn’t take them too long to come up with a good enough concept.
Once you add personal details and your various online profiles (nearly 50 are currently supported, from LinkedIn to Yelp and our own CrunchBase), you can pick a custom theme out of nearly 30 proposed designs – most of which are free, others are only available with premium accounts – and automatically have your online business card published. It’s hCard compliant and people can download a vCard from your personal Card.ly profile by clicking the recognizable icon under the title.
You can also embed widgets for your profile, which I have done at the top of this post. Finally, some themes support a ‘Stream’ tab, which basically doubles as a lifestreaming web application by pulling together all the activity from the profiles you added to your Card.ly account.
Card.ly is free when you’re content with a limited choice of skins and RSS feeds, as well as couple of other restrictions, but there’s a premium version that will set you back $24.99 a year. The paid account comes with more themes to choose from, unlimited RSS streams, and more goodies like advertisement-free cards. Not as cheap as I’d like it to be, but I paid for it just for the fact that I can link to my Google Analytics account and get advanced statistics on my personal card.
Your opinion?