The meme is out there: it's the end of the business card, and all those stacks of bent and torn little name plates will be history pretty soon.

Why? Applications like Bump on the iPhone, and, of course, the Poken and its unique contact sharing technology.

Which one is better?
Is any solution perfect? If not, is one better than the other, and why?

No, not one is perfect. Bump might be great for you if you have an iPhone (or a Droid) and so do many in your professional or personal groups. Poken: same thing. If you know folks with them, or if you're at a trade show or conference where they dominate, then it's a perfect solution.

Both use hardware to transfer contact data. Bump allows you to--here it comes--bump two phones together to swap data (after you boot up the app). Poken, again, same deal: tap Poken-to-Poken, swap information.

Sound the same right? Nope.

Tools vs. Philosophy
The key difference here is not in the hardware, or in the process. The big difference is in the underpinnings, in the philosophy behind the tool.

Bump, for all it's insight and ability, is simply a digital substitute for a traditional business card. Swap contact information, and leave.

Poken, on the other hand, has evolved past the "substitute" stage and solved a problem that we had come to accept as a fact of life. What problem? Stale address books.

Stale Information
Scenario: go to a show, swap business cards. Come back, enter your data into your computer's address book, CRM, or other contact manager. Then, the inevitable: watch your data get older and older and older, and then in time become meaningless. Emails change, people switch jobs, phones, addresses, screen names.

Sure: they'll write you and let you know about the new email address and you'll put it in your contact manager "later" and in the mean time you'll just keep responding to that email with their new address on it, changing the subject line.

Stale address books: the biggest problem with business cards, and with Bump. Sure, you can trade data, but when your contact changes their data, it doesn't change on your iPhone. It stays the same, they move on, and you lose that connection.

Poken: Organic, Dynamic, Always Connected
Not so with Poken. "Touch. Connect. Stay Connected." The tagline is more philosophy than marketing.

With Poken's dynamic, organic address book, once you tap Pokens with someone, you start a relationship. You tap, go home, put your Poken into your USB port, upload your new Poken friends to the website.

Once your accounts are linked--when you see their information and they see yours--whenever they make a change to their Poken.com account--a new email, for instance, or they add a Flickr account--that change will be immediately reflected in your Poken account.

Touch. Connect. Stay Connected. That's the Poken difference.