business cards go high tech with Poken

One of our high-tech clients just finished their annual conference in Vancouver. This group the is perfect training ground for new meeting technologies, because the delegates are inquisitive early adopters, game to try anything once. This year, our social experiment was Poken: your social business card.

Pokens are small USB drives (AKA thumb drives, jump drives, memory sticks, etc.) that contain your contact information. Users plug them into their computers to create a Poken profile, which can also include any other social media information you might want to add, such as links to your Facebook page, twitter handle, etc.

The Poken devices can be customized with your conference logo, or you can select from several dozen stock Poken designs, which run the gamut from funky to fierce.

Poken has a little hand-shaped end that you can “high five” with other Poken users to swap information. When two Pokens are touched together, they light up so users know that their information has been shared. I was a bit apprehensive that Poken would catch on, but during our six-day conference, we had:

• 17,337 - Poken interactions
• 1,409 - Linked Pokens
• 3,366 - User logins

Though the numbers speak for themselves, my very favorite review of Poken came via the conference’s twitter stream: “Poken is the saviour for drunk research-related conversations I otherwise wouldn't remember in the morning.” So, Pokens are also good for jogging fuzzy memories.

Coming soon on the Poken front: Poken tagging using your iphone and other smart phones. Though the Pokens themselves are pretty nifty, that’s awesome too!