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If you are feeling a bit of a credit crunch around this time of year, it might be a good idea to check out the reviews of business credit cards on NextAdvisor.com here. The reviews site is trying to bulk up its business offerings, and now covers business VOIP services, some basic recommendations on cloud computing, online meeting providers and Web hosting services, in addition to its consumer offerings that it cut its teeth on such as best dating sites and diet programs.

We last wrote about them earlier this fall, looking at their reviews of online backup service providers. They add oodles of content each week, and their comparison charts are very well done, giving you the implications of features and pricing options for each service covered. All the content is free and well organized.

St. Louis-based mother-son team Spearhead Development has updated its QR Card Us product in response to customer feedback, cranking out a new iteration in just one week. We covered the launch of the mobile Web-powered business card provider on August 18.

The new version of QR Card Us separates the QR link itself from the 'hard card,' or physical business card, so that customers can buy standalone QR Cards - mobile-friendly Web pages from which contact info can be saved - without worrying about their physical cards becoming outdated. It also adds Organizations, which allow a moderator to manage QR Cards for a company, club or any kind of group. Finally, the update adds Notes, which lets users attach any kind of text note about a new contact to their saved info.

Spearhead Development has launched an all-new version of its QR Card Us product today. QR Card Us provides customers with a custom-printed business card that contains a QR (quick response) code, allowing smartphone users to quickly scan their contact information. Whereas the first version of QR Card Us displayed a large QR code that contained an entire encoded vCard of one's contact information, the new QR Card contains a small code that's just a Web link. The Web page displays the contact's information, links to websites, one-click connections to social media and the option to save a vCard via email. Anyone can type in an email address, but signing up for a free Spearhead account allows email saving with one click.

By moving from a direct vCard scan to a Web link, QR Card can now provide users with detailed analytics to measure the effectiveness of their networking. But if this sounds like some robotic, dystopian vision of the future, with people scanning each other's bar codes instead of shaking hands, you've got the wrong idea. Michael Schade, 19-year-old creator of QR Card Us, has designed this whole experience around getting the contact exchange out of the way, so people can concentrate on getting to know each other. "Existing technologies are great in their initial idea of making things automatic," Schade says, "but unfortunately, the technology tends to get in the way of real-world communication, and we want to get rid of that. It should make things better, not make it harder to connect."

As Small Business Week gets underway in the United States, online business card creation service MOO is marking the occasion by launching a self-service portal for small businesses.

MOO's Business Services accounts are available to companies with at least 10 employees. They're simply a way for small teams to order business cards for multiple people simultaneously. Other perks included enhanced customer service and additional industry-specific design templates.

After a few years of buzz in mobile marketing circles, QR - or "quick response" - codes are finally starting to pop up in the United States, thanks in large part to the proliferation of smart phones.

While they're still not exactly mainstream, QR codes are appearing in major print publications and plastered on storefronts and buildings. At this rate, it won't be long before most people can immediately recognize and use QR codes. So how can small businesses take advantage of this emerging technology?

Fall is the unofficial start of conference season for professionals looking to get together, learn more and network with one another. I've personally been to four conferences in the last month alone, some about technology and business, and one for journalists.

Regardless of industry, there is one age-old relic of professional networking that refuses to die: the business card. Even at the most high-tech and cutting edge of events, you still can't mingle without collecting a pocket full of paper cards. Surely, this can't go on forever. The business card is ripe to be disrupted. But what will replace it?

As our professional lives increasingly happen in the cloud and on the go, one decidedly old school aspect of networking that remains prevalent is the paper-based business card. Dozens of Web and mobile apps have attempted to recreate the business card for a digital world, some more effectively than others. Here are three that look promising.

"From paper cards to email contacts." This is Part Two of a two-part post. The first part is here.

As noted earlier, I had the opportunity to put e-business cards to a real-world test this past week at the DEMO conference. While I found a somewhat workable solution for sending out my contact info to others, I still collected a large stack of paper business cards from the people I met. These cards had to be digitized in order for them to be of any use to me. While people with administrative assistants are fortunate to have this tiresome data entry process handled for them, those of us without are stuck doing it ourselves. We can either sit at the keyboard for hours or use a scanner. Shouldn't there be a better way?

Part One: "Here's My Card"

This past week, I had the opportunity to put e-business cards to a real-world test thanks to a recent trip to the DEMO 09 conference in Palm Desert, California. You would think that if any group of people would have adopted the electronic business card model for exchanging their contact data, it would be the technology community. Yet at conferences like DEMO and all the others, printed paper cards are still exchanged. Why is that?

The popular and quirky MOO.com is a print shop providing stickers, postcards, business cards and personal introduction cards, which are narrower and longer cards. The products can feature artistic images you select from the site's offerings or can be printed using photos you upload to the service. Notable for promoting the artwork of hip designers, the MOO service is a favorite among the young and hip as well as among those who want to stand out as being non-traditional.