Why use a Poken when you have a mobile?
That’s the question you’re hearing up and down on Twitter right now. Vaughan Rivett has something to say about this and I agree. The answer is easy: a simple transfer of contact data with equally low entry barrier as Poken is not possible with mobile phones right now.
It’s obvious with questions like: “Why Poken? I got an iPhone!”. Well, even if there was an easy solution for exchanging contact data (and with the massive amount of iPhone apps, I’m pretty sure there is one), not everyone you may want to change data with has an iPhone. The 15€ for a Poken are disproportionate to the price of an iPhone just to exchange some contacts.
All right, what about cross mobile platform solutions? Well, those solutions exist for quite some time now. The problem is that nobody is using them. A reason for this might be that mobile phones don’t have the means to exchange data easily. Although there are technologies on the horizon, for now we are stuck with Bluetooth as a common denominator for data exchange in mobiles. The setup and handling of Bluetooth with exchanging PINs first is just too much of a hassle to exchange some contact data. It’s just not convinient.
And then there is “e” or hellomynameise. It works like this:
Connect with E from Renato Valdés Olmos on Vimeo.
And this is nice as it works on all mobiles with Internet access but that’s a problem in itself. Even if you have such a mobile, you also better have a data subscription as mobile internet is still pretty expensive. But let’s say you have all this, I picture the process like that: get my mobile from my bag (5 seconds), open the mobile browser (5 secs), surf to the page (10 secs), exchange the ID with my partner (15 secs) and after only 35 seconds we have successfully exchanged data. Hurray! Well, assuming UMTS availibility and no one mistypes the ID. All in all: nice, but not really intuitive. Even e knows this and also wants to offer so called Connectors in the future.
In conclusion: Poken right now seems like the most easy and accessible solution for electronically exchanging contact data. What do you think?
März 20th, 2009 at 3:20 pm
Thanx for your post!
First, the phase we are in now seems to be a temporary one. We’re waiting for NFC to pop up in the majority of phones (late 2010), so we can connect by keeping our phones close to eachother. Untill that time, we’re stuck in the Poken/E/others phase.
Talking about E, I have to disagree on some of the points. The power of E is the combination of both platforms:
- Mobile (app OR website): you can either use the E iPhone app (which is, of course faster) or use the E website
- Connector
Another thing I really like about E is the possibility to have up to 3 different profiles. So, I can have a personal and a business profile. I really miss that in Poken.
Really curious about some data on the German poken-o-sphere; do you have any idea on numbers, audience, etc?
März 20th, 2009 at 4:28 pm
Hi Polle,
thanks for commenting!
As I hinted and linked in the article, NFC is on the horizon. But I think it will take much longer than 2010 until we see a critical mass of mobiles equipped with it in the actual public. You won’t buy a new mobile just to exchange contacts more easily. But some company providing cheap NFC hardware that is doing this and is compatible with future mobile implementations would be awesome (Are you listening Poken or e?).
Regarding e: Well, I would be equally in flames for e as I am for Poken, but lets face it: Poken is here and e is not. Closed Beta doesn’t cut it and I have yet to see a final production Connector for myself.
Also: of course you can have multiple profiles with Poken. You can either bind multiple profiles to one Poken device or have multiple Pokens, each with a different profile.
Regarding the german poken-o-sphere: it has not been officially launched here in Germany, so no data for now.