If you work at a start-up (or are an investor with deep pockets), you undoubtedly get dozens of business cards every time you enter a room. If you’re like me, you go home, skim through the ones that pique your interest and file them. The rest get either put in a drawer that I dub “The Black Hole” or the recycling bin.

    In the spirit of honesty, I’m not a VC but I did have fun masquerading as one at a recent conference called BioFinance and got some interesting cards. But if you’re a road-warrior, lugging your card album with you is a pain. Some people have nifty (read: pricey) card scanners, and keep a collection on their laptops/Flickr, but a new startup called CloudContacts offers a service to scan the cards for you, and upload them into the “cloud”.

    You sign up for service ($30 for up to 100 cards), and then mail them your cards. They scan and upload them to your account, and then you can access them through their site. A neat feature is their “one-click connect” which lets you add contacts in your collection directly to Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. I haven’t read any details about tagging and the like, but I’m sure it’s got that in there too. I can imagine one of my tags now: “Scotch-Fan”. That way I can make sure I get to that person early in the evening before they imbibe, ensuring they don’t confuse me with this guy.

    Cool idea, and while I’m a casual fan of the whole cocktail-party-rigmarole, I’m not enough of a big fish (yet) to necessitate the service. The old school method of using Outlook to manage my offline contacts works well enough. But people with schedules full of hand-shaking and frequent-flyer miles should be pleased with another option to tap their rolodex anytime, anywhere.

    But that said, when are we going to see vCards transmitted via Bluetooth to everyone’s Blackberry more regularly? I really thought that would catch on more than I’ve seen in my limited experience. Have any readers had success with vCards during networking functions? Also, has anyone been subjected to unintended vCards, broadcast by some Bluetooth–crazy self-promoter?