I was lucky to meet the German Affiliate of Poken S.A. in Cologne and get some facts about the new business Pokens:

• Might be available as soon as August
• No more limit to 64 contacts in one session
• 2 GB USB on-board Flash memory
• Extended battery life
• 4 basic designs
• Special limited artist editions

No information about the price except that they will be “affordable”. So it seems the “little black Pokens” will really be available pretty soon. And furthermore Poken S.A. seems to have lots of other things in the pipeline, so I’m pretty psyched about the things to come.

It contains: 4 standard Pandas, 2 Geishas, 2 Elvis, 2 Scream and 2 Frankenstein. Reeeally nice, Poken, thank you! Makes me look forward to the next 12pack.

Oh, and you can win some of these. Want to know how? Come back this weekend!

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?

The reason is simple: even if Poken is “just” a service, it’s a social one. It’s about social connections and targets people that already use one or multiple social networks. But those are people that are used to actually have some kind of dialog with their service platforms.

Facebook, Flickr, and such are social networks all right, but are above all they are a service. They are a product. And they do their best to talk to their customers and to get into a dialog with them. Because they want to create a positive experience for their users. To make them feel like they are part of something. To show them that they are important and to value their membership.

Now, Poken has a link to Get Satisfaction on their feedback page. All right, but Get Satisfaction is a platform for customer support, not to get into a dialog. This is shown by the template-like answers to user input. “The company is working on this idea” – what does this mean? It will be there next week? Next month? By the end of the year? What priority does this have compared to, let’s say, bugs? It’s an information all right, but it’s not really communication. At least not clear communication withou clicking through the respective threads, hoping to find some answers.

A Twitter-search for #Poken shows many many people that are making their first steps with their new Poken. But it also shows people with questions and people that are unsure or misinformed. It would be better to go out, find and talk to those people to clear up their issues. If you are in doubt that this would help, just follow this little chat.

But not only the missing channel from the users back to Poken is a problem right now. Also the communication from Poken to it’s users has severe issues. For some time people are complaining that they can’t activate their social networks. And what is the answer in Get Satisfaction? “The company is working on this problem”. Yeah, right. So, what is the problem? When can we expect it to be fixed? Why do I have to scroll down to find this information? And why is there no information about this on the Poken news section on the website? It’s a base functionality – one that every new user that just payed money for a Poken is likely to run into when he creates his account. He needs to know that this is just a minor issue that is being worked on and asked to be patient.

So, I think Poken needs a community manager that..

• clears up questions in the community
• gets in touch with the unsure and misinformed
• gets into a dialog with the community
• explains the community what is going on inside Poken S.A.
• explains Poken S.A. what is going on in the community
• spreads the word that Pokens are awesome

If right now I had just one wish to Poken S.A. it would be this one.

Well, here are the two versions I know:

The left one is the Poken that was inside my Lift09 badge. It doesn’t look like a production model and the date on the edge says “02.02.2009″. The “cute” Pokens have a very different layout. If you want to open one yourself, here is a YouTube video that shows how.

So, what is all this? First you’ll notice the USB port. Also clearly visible is the coil (the white round thing) that should point in the direction you want to high four the other Pokens. The Lift model does not have a button for ghost mode etc. while on the cute model it’s inside the coil ring.

The heart of it all seems to be a 18F14k50 chip from Microchip Technology. But that’s where the easy insights end. As Stéphane hinted in his Google TechTalk video, no obvious or known RFID or wireless chips. The coil hints to something like induction but I have to admit I’m not much of an hardware guy. I will rather poke at the software side of things in the next couple of days and see what’s going on there. But if somebody knows a bit more what’s there, please write it up and link it in the comments, thanks!

See the lash on the bottom left? Inside is a Poken, a small gadget that allows you to share your personal data with other people. So if 2 Pokens are held together, they exchange the data that is stored on them.

Actually, it goes like this: first, you enter your personal data on the Poken website, then you bind your Poken devices to this account. Then you are ready to exchange your data with other Pokens. So each Poken only transmits your Poken ID when held together. After pokening around you connect your poken device with a computer via USB and load all the collected user profiles into your Poken account.

While at the conference it was an absolute blast to use the Pokens. In an instant they made business cards superfluous by bringing so much more to the table – just by holding together our conference badges, we were able to exchange not only names, but also images, social media links and so on.

Also at the conference were some people from Poken (the company). I had a chat with Stéphane Doutriaux and Bryan Guido Hassin and I really liked what I heard. They were really enthusiastic about their creation.

Apart from the “conference badge” model there are severeal cute ones for private use. After tweeting about the Pokens, the people from the agency back home were equally intrigued and told me to bring some home with me. So I did – and all 24 were gone in a flash.

I think there is something about those little plastic things. They are real extensions of the virtual social networks, which are based on real interactions. They are easy and most of all: fun! So let’s see where these Pokens lead us and what connections they allow us to bond. Let’s Poken up!