Icon launches, making business cards digital and beautiful
Research shows that a first impression is formed within the first three seconds of meeting someone, be it online or in person, personally or professionally, so the truth is that what is currently offered as aggregators of all of your contact information and social networks is mostly ugly designs that fail to accurately represent you, or your brand. If you’ve been wanting something sexier than the digital business card companies that have been acquired by legacy brands and run into the ground, Icon will be officially launching next week, but we’ve gotten a sneak peek behind what the team has been up to.
Rather than bore you with instructions, take a look for yourself, it’s very self explanatory, which is great for busy professionals like yourself:
The final result is stunning
Icon Co-Founder and CEO, Kent Savage tells AGBeat that combining his extensive background perfecting the art of business engagement combined with Co-Founder and CCO, Matt Hovis’ perfection of identity management, they have created a brilliant answer to the growing number of contacts in our worlds. Any time a startup is born when people are frustrated and say “there’s got to be a better way,” a winning product is often the result.
Savage notes that Icon is the best way to present your personal brand to a professional audience, and that the business card is timeless and the perfect construct, but in the physical world, they can fall out of pockets, get lost in a pile of papers, and never serve its core function of connecting two people.
Additionally, Icon serves as a way not just to share your information with people you meet, or to connect online with others that you already know (a common feature of new products that launch with social integration), rather uncovers key commonalities between users, helping to expand your network. From the early adopters featured in the showcase, it’s an upper echelon of professionals rather than the standard Twitter-types.
Analytics and mobile awesomeness
There is a pro version that allows users to customize colors and add their logo for better branding, and an analytics suite that uncovers data that is actionable.
Icon also has a cool mobile feature wherein at an event, you can simply hit “share” on your Icon and send your card via text or email, and when texted, it isn’t a long line of ugly text, it is actually optimized in the form of a card with a set of buttons (like “call,” which hello, is awesome) as seen below:
What your Icon will look like
Setup took roughly three minutes, and that’s while taking a call. Here is the final product of what various Icon cards look like:
