Contact service Yes.tel wants to bury the business card

July 5, 2009 | Anthony Ha | Comments |

yestel-logoYes.tel, a new service created by a startup called Digitrad, offers an easy way to store and share all your contact info. In doing so, it wants to help our society get past one of the more obnoxious holdovers from the pre-Internet age — the business card.

You’ve probably heard of ways to move your business cards to the web, such as CloudContacts. But those services aren’t really eliminating the need to hand out cards, they’re just creating an easier way to store the cards you have.

Yes.tel has a different focus: From now on, instead of giving someone a card, you just tell people, “Go to www.anthonyha.tel”. (Uh, with your name inserted, of course.) When they do, visitors will see a handy list of all your contact info. Then they can click on that information to take action — for example, if they view your .tel page on their phone, they can tap on your phone number to give you a call.

Now I like the vision here, but of course there are many other ways to share your contact information online. In my case, my profiles on various social networks, my author profile on VentureBeat (see the box below this story), and my personal website all include my email address. The benefits here are the simple set-up, the fact that “.tel” domains are relatively open right now (compared to “.com” and others), and the additional services Digitrad provides, namely a local phone number with voicemail, an email re-direction system, and anti-spam and antivirus services

Yes.tel has been available for about 10 weeks, and has seen about 250,000 registrations, the company says — and it just became available in the United States, where Digitrad is charging an $19.99 annual fee. The company has offices in Paris, London, and Silicon Valley and has raised $2.5 million provided by an angel investor, chief executive Micha Benoliel, and UK-based Winning Choices Holdings.

You can watch a Yes.tel commercial here.

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About the Author, Anthony Ha

Anthony is VentureBeat's assistant editor, as well as its reporter on enterprise technology, cloud computing, and tech policy. Before joining VentureBeat in 2008, Anthony worked at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing. He attended Stanford University and now lives in San Francisco. Reach him at anthony@venturebeat.com. You can also follow Anthony on Twitter.

  • Jack
    The printed business card still has a place. It's so easy to hand someone a card even if it just has your email and web addy on it.
  • Handing is the easy part. Storing and organizing is the hard part, at least for me ... which is why I prefer to send someone an email with all my contact info in the signature, rather than hand over a card.
  • when you subscribe to Yes.tel you also get for free:
    - a local phone number
    - an email
    - a unified voicemail
    - 100 MOO cards with your profile

    Use Voucher VIP69007 and get USD 10.00 discount.
  • K C
    This doesn't thrill me. The beauty of physical business cards is that they are 100% "opt in". That is, for every one person who has my business card there are at least 2 I wish specifically didn't. The higher up you get in the corporate ranks, the more sensitive direct dial phone numbers and emails become. Thus the peons are all likely to put their info on a .tel page but no one you actually want to have in your Rolodex will.
  • Hmm, there's some truth to that, though I often find that due to social pressure, etc. I have less control over who I can give my business to than I'd expect. Of course, I tend to broadcast my contact info pretty widely online.
  • yechiam
    As an addition to the classic paper made-cheap to be manufactured-light to be carried around business cards - it's all right. But remember that to hand out those cards you don't need a screen, nor a mouse or a keyboard and so on. It's so simple and friendly - why bother digitalizing it?
    Yechiam - dcp-print.com
  • markkolb
    You can create and print .tel related business cards and images via www.bizcards.tel
  • .tel domains are significantly better than physical business cards in the privacy field: you can specifically decide who sees which piece of information in your .tel domain.
    Some info you'll keep public, some you'll give to your family, some other you'll give to co-workers.