Without a doubt, we live in an all-digital age, when everything related to paper in its classic form is starting to go extinct. After all, we're seeing the signs of the dissolution of printed media everywhere, with online news outlets becoming a lot more popular than actual newspapers, paperback books being replaced by tiny epub or PDF files loaded onto eBook readers fitted with eInk displays... and the list goes on.

For this reason, it should come as no surprise that the same process affects the business card segment as well. Ok, I know, many of you might not even own a business card, but those of you who do (and who are forced, due to the nature of your jobs) can relate to the fact that they always seem to run out when you need them most, as well as to the fact that, quite often, one tends to lose track of all the cards he or she might have received.

On the other hand, what happens when you're forced to change your employer (something that has happened a lot over the past few months or so) or some of the contact details? Will you track back every single person you've ever handed your business card to?

Well, if you're not quite sure where I'm getting, fret no more, since this is where the Poken concept comes into play. This system (I wouldn't call it a device, because it's much more than that) introduced the idea of an all-digital business card, which allows users to exchange their contact details by simply placing two tiny gadgets near each other for a couple of seconds.

Furthermore, the physical devices (which were kindly provided for testing by our friends from Pokenmania) are accompanied by a very interesting online service (the Dashboard) that enables users to manage their contacts in a very interesting, web 2.0-ish manner. Of course, that's just one of the features provided by this service, but we won't go into further details yet, because we want to talk a bit about the Poken Spark itself first.