In a move which is likely to catapult UK startup Moo onto a new international stage, the company has become the only one to deeply integrate its ‘social business cards’ with the Facebook platform today. Taking pictures from users’ Facebook Timeline information and photography, users will now be able to create 50 personalised business cards for £10/$15. But in a promotion from today Moo is giving away cards to the first 200,000 users, equivalent to 10 million cards.
The cards can feature a different photo image on the front of the cards together with a favourite quote or saying on the reverse. This will doubly act as a promo for Facebook’s Timelime as people will be able to take snapshots of their lives from their Timelines and put them onto the cards.
Facebook spokesperson Jillian Stefanki says “The MOO.COM integration makes it possible for people to take [the Timeline] experience with them offline.”
Richard Moross, CEO and Founder of MOO.COM told me the deal was put together daily quickly after an ‘enthusiastic Moo user” at Facebook, who was also a product manager, contacted him about a partnership.
The integration took about four or five weeks as although Moo had a basic integration with Facebook, “this is a more involved integration and we have had more exposure inside Facebok than before” says Moross.
Moo is the only partner for these social cards so far and won the contract with Facebook because it has “been doing this for 5/6 years so we are the most experienced online printer in working with social networks,” says Moross.
It also fulfils his original vision of the ‘social business card’: “My original idea was for a modern business card that connected online with offline, so it’s funny that years later this is now complete and it’s something which is very satisfying personally to me.”
He says Moo remains confident that it will be able to delver cards to anywhere in the world, given it has already done so in 200 different countries.
“We’re not quite sure where this could go but we’re confident we can scale this. We have capacity to print millions of cards a day and we’ve done this with many of partners before,” he says.
Moo’s revenues are made mostly in the US business followed by Europe then Asia.
Moo’s trump card, as it were, was its initial integration with Flickr. Now its Facebook integration could see the value of this startup soar. The company was backed by Atlas Venture, Index Ventures and The Accelerator Group with a $5m Series A round in 2006 but has not needed to raise money since.
He’s my personalised Facebook card:
