Sunday, February 6, 2011

Business Card Holders Make Great Gifts

By Paul Maxwell


No matter what technology has brought to us over the years, many people still love to have regular old-fashioned business card holders at their disposal.

There are two major types of business card holders. The first kind is the type that holds business cards that are given to us. These can range in size from something that would hold 20 or 30 cards at a time to huge portfolios that will hold over 1000. They can be made in a variety of materials from leather to vinyl to even material covered books. Some are meant to be carried with us and others are meant to be left at the office.

The second type of business card holder is much simpler. It is a business card holder that would hold our own business cards, or generic cards for our company, and be placed on either a desk or at reception area where customers and clients would be able to take one. They can be made from a simple type of plastic, 14 karat gold, sterling silver, or even solid mahogany. This type of business card holder happens to be a very common gift for a business person. They can be personalized with initials, logos, or even with the addition of engraved photos.

Of course, it didn't take long for these little devices to fall out of favor with the general public. Once people realized that technology has its own quirks, vis-a-vis crashing and losing data, all these electronic Rolodex users quickly reverted back to the old-fashioned hard for business card holders they had before.

Depending on how many business cards we had accumulated over years keep handed on how much time and energy it took to manually input the names, phone numbers, fax numbers, and addresses all these business contacts.

Aside from these electronic versions of the business card holders, holders come in to basic formats. One of course is the type of book or booklet into which we would place individual business cards into slots or sleeves and we would carry this around with us or, if it was too large, we would simply keep it at the office as a convenient reference material.

As technology grew new inventions quickly replaced these electronic databases and soon we were given the ability to scan each business card into a computer or a smart phone. The beauty of this technology was multifold. It allowed us to capture images of the exact business card rather than only keeping what was in text format, as the electronic databases from decades before did. It also gave us the opportunity to have these images located on a computer and a PDA at the same time, providing a marvelous backup opportunity in the event of a hard drive crash.

For all intents and purposes, these computers and PDAs have become newer versions of business card holders. However, many of us still refuse to give up our leather bound holders!




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