As I do networking professionally and attend dozens of industrial events every year, I experience the same problems that everyone else does. For example, I'm not 100 per cent sure who's business card it is after the event (I don't remember people's faces and what they spoke about). The smart guys know how to use a pen or a pencil and are lucky if the business card is "classic style" and has a lot of white spaces that fill the blanks with tags and tasks. Unfortunately, it doesn't help to remember your new friend's face if you don't have enough time and talent to draw a sketch of one's portrait.
Sometimes you will find a photo of a person on a business card. A bit odd, you wonder if he or she's an artist or whatever... For example everyone at the "Kodak company" has their photo on a business card and the business card itself is printed on the photo-paper. Well, you know - it's Kodak!
So, bridging the business card with tags and tasks and remembering a persons face is a challenge. The other problem every professional suffers from is how to get rid of all of these papers and transfer the contact info into digital.
Like others, I use an "Address book" -type program to work with my network contacts and details. My choice is "Contactizer Pro" (Mac) btw. Every time I come back from a conference it takes me about a week or two to get back in touch with all of the people I've met there.
Because I'm a friendly guy I get lots of business cards and experience all of the previously mentioned problems. Additionally, I need to re-enter the information into my Address Book, describe the person, create tasks to follow this new relationship, and so on... It takes a lot of time and I need to use my eyes and fingers to get the info from a card and enter it into the program. I know that some windows-users are happy enough to have special devices that scan the cards and forward the data directly to Outlook, but this expensive device looks awful and not geeky at all.
Being a LinkedIn user helps me to get my connection's contacts info using VCF files so that I don't actually need to re-enter them with my hands. If everyone from your actual network used LinkedIn you wouldn't need an ordinary Address Book. Therefore, you're luckier than I am, cause only 1/2 of my network uses LinkedIn. Let's just say it would be great that everyone would use LinkedIn and Facebook in the near future and we will forget such an artifact as a business card.
So when your new friend is a proud user of LinkedIn or Facebook there is a mobile solution and a free applications that helps you to "get connected".
I love to use "LinkedIn App", it is pretty quick and helpful to find people on-the-go. I can read their bio and professional experience details before actually meeting them. The one thing I actually hate in both "big" LinkedIn and iPhone App is that they don't give an option to bookmark the profiles and do private comment's on them before you add that person to your network. It's probably "ok" when I use browser version - I can just copy the address of the profile somewhere and remember it...
The first method of on-the-go networking is to use LinkedIn App and search for a person you were just talking with. You need to enter his email together with a short comment on what you've just talked about (it could be useful for yourself as well, believe me :-) and send him a connection request.
The disappointment of LinkedIn is that if a person will not answer this request - you probably will forget them even faster. At the same time it could be recognized as an advantage if someone unknown just wants to spam you.
The second method is to use a "Facebook App" that is more friendly and you don't need an email address to add somebody to your "friends list". You just need to search and click "add". You can send a Facebook message right away also, with the same comments on what you were talking about. Facebook App actually gives you even more friendly possibility to take a group picture of you and your friend at the event venue and to send it. Maybe he or she will like this... Maybe not!
But my favorite way of doing networking on-the-go is by using Evernote App. This gives you a great opportunity to solve the problem of remembering the person and to get rid of the need to save his business card.
As you may well know "Evernote" is a great Application that helps to organize your handwritten notes and texts in the single app available for different platforms. I have Evernote on my home Mac, on my MacBook, and on the iPhone. All of the data is synced over the network so I don't care where from it was originally posted. The additional solution is the "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR) that Evernote does on the server-side when you upload a photo (a picture), doing it so that you can search the text inside the taken picture.
So how will Evernote help with on-the-go networking? I create a "Snapshot Note" with "Evernote App", take a picture of a business card or a badge of a person I'm speaking with, and add his name, tags, and all of the additional info I want to. I could also add his photo, but unfortunately that would be another note, cause Evernote allows you to take only one pic per note.
Then when I'm updating my contacts from the event, I just need to search for specific info I've entered before or to check all the entries. As Evernote lets you create multiple notebooks you can just add the new notebook for the current event and then go through all your notes for this event.
Off-course "OCR" accuracy depends on the quality of the photo, and all experienced iPhone users know that iPhone cameras suck :-), especially when taking a pictures of small things like a business card. The pics usually turn out blurry. Evernote promotes "Clarifi case" for iPhone 3G that makes close-up photos incredibly crisp. I'll buy one as soon as I become rich enough to buy an "iPhone 3G". Until that wonderful time I'll be a happy user of a good-old "iPhone 1".