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Jan 29 2009

Will Poken catch on ?

Poken is the new gadget in town. Some people called it the future of social networking.

The idea of exchanging data at the click of a button , or less has been here fore ages. The problem always is that the tool needs to gain Critical Mass before it becomes useful.

I remember transferring my VCard from my Palm Pilot or Handspring Visor to other people's Palm Pilot , or using different IrDA protocols to transfer my details between different phones, that worked fine, for the happy few that had similar devices. These days we transfer details over SMS' messages or Bluetooth, but then they are stuck in the mobile phone, with the Palm I at least imported them in my PIM.

The thing is not everybody had a Palm, not everybody had a IrDa enabled phone , and people tend to turn off Bluetooth for security reasons. The idea of adding a (soon to be rebranded) TikiTag to your business card seemed cool, So far I could hand out 2 cards to people whom I was absolutely sure they had a reader ,

So different efforts have tried already the same .. to exchange digital data while people had physical contact. none of them seems to have catched on .. yet.

My Poken is on the way .. maybe this time it will catch on .. who knows .. it surely looks more viral than the others ...