April WebInno Meeting: Jack Cards

I went to the Web Innovators meeting in Boston last night (April 2nd, 2008). I made these recordings after looking at a number of the demonstrations. I'd originally planned on writing them up, but given time constraints, I'm going to leave it with the original audio. Sorry About the quality, it was a *very* crowded ballroom.
http://www.webinnovatorsgroup.com/
http://www.jackcards.com/

Jack Cards apparently has been getting a lot of coverage in the mainstream press, and I can see why. It has that kind of magic mix of online and offline that makes it stand out. That said, I just don't see a future for it. I wouldn't have mentioned it at all except that people seemed excited about it; so I figured it was worth saying why I'm not.

Jack Cards has the goal of keeping you from forgetting about birthdays, anniversaries and all those other events when you need to send cards. They've done an impressive job. You can put in the events, enter the names/addresses of people, enter their interests, and get a wide selection of cards that match those. And you can choose them years in advance!

The magic piece is that we aren't talking digital cards. These are real cards. And secondly, they don't mail them to the destination. Instead they mail them to *you*, enough in advance that you can fill out the card, personalize it, and then stuff it in the SASE and forward it on. That's pretty cool.

But I just don't see it. First of all, I hardly send physical cards anymore. Secondly, when I do, they are made using pictures of my family (last time we just used CVS to do it; uploaded the picture, picked up the cards that evening). The mail-it-to-me-in-advance model doesn't work real well there, although presumably they could email me a reminder to upload a recent picture.

It just seems to me that the overhead of doing those SASE's, and packing and shipping all these onesie/twosie sets of cards, has got to be pretty high. I don't know what their pricing is, but obviously there's some premium there. I just don't think they are going to drive enough traffic (and remember, they don't get a lot of cost savings from larger traffic) to make it fly.

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