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mobile-friendly Web pages from which contact info can be saved - without worrying about their physical cards becoming outdated.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

Teams that need to manage a large number of contacts will want to consider taking a look at ContactZilla, a relatively new contact management tool comparable to Gist.

ContactZilla allows you to import contacts from Twitter, LinkedIn and Google, as well as manually enter information about people one-by-one.

As we've said before, consolidation is a watch-word for 2011. Every week we're seeing acquisitions in the cloud, data analysis and enterprise social software market. We've already covered one of this week's biggest announcements: RIM's acquisition of Gist. Here are three more acquisitions worth taking note of.

Google just launched a revamped interface for Gmail and a major upgrade to the Gmail Contacts application. The updated Gmail interface now features three separate links for Mail, Contacts and Tasks at the top of the left sidebar, while the "compose mail" and "add contact" buttons have moved underneath these links. The Gmail Contacts application, which is the focal point of today's update, now offers users the ability to sort contacts by last name and to create custom labels for phone numbers and other fields that turn the application into a lightweight CRM solution.

Silentale, the searchable archive of all your email and Web-based communication, is now available as a mobile app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Like the desktop version of the service, the new app provides a "360 degree view of your contacts," explains the company, including conversation history with email recipients, Facebook friends, Twitter, Google and Highrise contacts and LinkedIn connections.

Mozilla Contacts, the experimental project from the organization behind the Firefox web browser, has released a new version of their Contacts add-on which introduces Facebook integration. Previously, Mozilla Contacts allowed you to import your various address books spread out across the Web (think: multiple email accounts, Twitter friends, LinkedIn colleagues, Plaxo contacts, Mac OS X address book, etc.) into the Web browser itself - in this case, obviously, Firefox. Once there, the combined address book information could be used in form autocompletion everywhere across the Web and more.

Now, an updated version of Mozilla Contacts (download link) introduces a number of new features, most notably integration with Facebook Contacts and something called a "person URL."

Currently, your contacts live in address books that are distributed all over the Internet and your desktop. Because of this, chances are that you have numerous address books on the web that are often "inconsistent and disjointed." Contacts, a new Mozilla Labs project, wants to put an end to this. The Contacts addon creates a local database for all your email and Twitter contacts that can then be used by your browser and any website that supports Contacts' API.

A few weeks ago we brought you a brief list of social networks for meeting and conversing with entrepreneurs, and in the comments section we received lots of suggestions that could have made the list as well. One such suggestion was Sprouter, which is, for lack of a better description and despite having a few unique features, a Twitter clone for entrepreneurs.

A while back, a friend of mine wondered about LinkedIn's somewhat limited options for indicating how you know someone. ("I vomited on their shoes at the office party" isn't on the list, for example.) We had a back-and-forth on her blog, and I came up with a list of some potentially useful additions to LinkedIn's categories.

You'll find them below... but they're only a starting point. Kindly add yours in the comments, and maybe - just maybe - they'll be coming soon to a form field near you.