Do you Poken? I tried to, and apparently failed miserably at it. Chris Miller has been talking about Poken for a while now, he even gave one away as a prize at the Fall 2009 meeting of the Tri State Lotus User Group. I was not convinced that Poken was the answer but decided to give it a try anyway for Lotusphere 2010. Don’t get me wrong, the idea is a good one, create your contact information, store it on the device, and exchange contact information easily. The contact information you gathered is then loaded up on your computer, and easily exported for import in to your Contact Manager of choice (Notes Personal Address Book in my case). No paper, no typing over information… sounds easy right? The problem is despite having my Poken attached to my badge in plain sight of all for the entire Lotusphere I exchanged contact information with exactly one person via Poken all week. The only time I used the Poken was following Gurupalooza on Thursday. As I made my way down off the stage a person walked up and asked if that was a Poken, and then proceeded to exchange contact information with me while telling me he was waiting all week to find someone to exchange data via Poken. So to me Poken is a good idea, but I don’t think many people are motivated to go out and get one, especially with applications like Bump and MyNameisE for the iPhone and LinkedIn now allowing you to connect via their iPhone app as well.
Mitch:
To take that one step further. I tried to upload your contact info using my laptop (Ubuntu) and failed. Once I got home, I tried on my Windows machine and the entire Poken was wiped, no HTML file or anything. Not quite ready for primetime I think.
However, if Poken had worked with Lotus and provided a Poken in every backpack (Lotus branded of course) there would have been 6000 geeks poking each other.
Do that at enough geek conventions and the word is out. The device will NOT make it on its own though.
Mitch, I’ve been walking around LS with my Poken in plain sight too. I also encountered just 1 person I exchanged data with(mine uploaded correctly).
I didn’t notice yours though.
Like you said, a great idea, but it has to be endorsed by big companies (like IBM).
We’ve been thinking of giving one to every BLUG attendee at our next event, but with 10 EUR per person it’s rather expensive for something that is probably useless afterwards.
Isn’t all just a moot point? With Skype and (to a lesser and lesser extent now for me) Twitter and LinkedIn there are a multitude of connection options.
The only use I have now for any contact “database” is for phone numbers so I can assign them to hot keys on the phone 😉