Last weekend, as I was cleaning out some old papers, I came across a stack of business cards I had collected at a conference, and it gave me an idea. Typically, when I get a business card, I enter the address into my address book or Highrise and then throw it away. It seems like a waste - it would be more efficient to just enter that information directly, but that would take too much time in any sort of social context.
As far as I can tell, the reason you may want to offer business cards is that you provide a product or service, and you want to card recipient to remember your name and contact you when he finds himself in need of whatever it is you provide. If that's the case, then the best thing you could hope for (with respect to the business card) is that the recipient would tape the card to his monitor so that when he found himself in need of your product or service, it would be staring him in the face. That seems unlikely to happen, but here is a way to make it happen in at least a few cases: put some immediately useful information on the card.
Ideally, the information you put on your card would be something that is hard to remember but frequently useful. Suppose you are targetting software developers. Most software developers I know have post-it notes of useful snippets (often obscure command-line flags) attached to their monitor. If you can guess what sort of snippet would be useful to them, you're golden.
As an example, the following snippet will find all of the files that have not been added to (or ignored in) a subversion repository and add them:
svn st | grep ? | awk '{print $2}' | xargs svn add
There are many ways to do the same thing, but a surprising number of programmers seem to use subversion and know only how to manually add new files.
As another example, I can never remember the Mac startup key combinations since I use them infrequently, but when I need them, it's really inconvenient to look them up (since my Mac is probably powered down at that point).
Even if you don't succeed in getting developers to tape your card to their monitors, you should succeed in getting their attention, which is all that most business cards seem to strive for now anyway.
