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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- mobile-friendly Web pages from which contact info can be saved - without worrying about their physical cards becoming outdated.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."

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?