Poken: Cute Gadget to Share your Contact Info and Social Network data

People like my google search themed cards. All they need to do is to search for my name and they get my homepage with my contact data. I have often thought about making it easy for people to share their contact information. Many people are working on this and to figure out a more modern alternative to business cards.

I came across this little gadget called Poken. It is a cute little figure that you carry with you.

The Poken’s arm is an USB drive and using the Poken software, you can store your social network data on it.

When you meet someone else who has a Poken – you place the two Pokens next to each other.

The profile information is exchanged between the two Pokens.

The glowing light indicates that the Pokens have read the information stored in each other.

Once you get back home to your computer, just slide out the Poken’s arm and slot it into your USB. Poken will be able to pull in the information of all the people your Poken interacted with.

The above screen shots are from this video that describes how Poken works

It a cool idea but both the parties need to have Pokens. I just ordered a couple of these Pokens. I’ll probably have them next week.

Here is a Poken developer talking about extending online social network to real world

Poken web site

There are some Poken meetups happening in Tokyo.

Japan seems to be the first place where Poken is seeing adoption in Asia. There is also a Poken festival happening in Tokyo on May 23 at Ginza.

Also check out this Connecter gadget made by mynameisE, a Dutch company. Similar concept.

Update: Pokens are now available in Singapore. You can buy Poken in Singapore at pickapoken.com