There’s an interesting discussion over on Inc. about how we’ve moved past the era of business cards. Writer Ilya Pozin posits that simply by telling people that we don’t use business cards, or telling them that we use something else, the problem will be solved.

Unfortunately I have to disagree rather strongly. In fact, Ilya even seems to disagree with himself, recommending CardMunch from LinkedIn. While CardMunch is a great product, we’ve discussed its major shortcoming before – All of the data that you collect gets locked inside of LinkedIn, and the only way to get it out is via a manual export process that takes entirely too long.

Here’s what we know, because FullContact has built a company around keeping people connected – Business cards are a $4.2 billion annual industry, and over 10 billion cards come into circulation every year. That doesn’t sound a thing like the end of an era. The problem that we have to solve is not how to get rid of business cards, but rather how we can actually put them to use. Over 91 percent of them never make it into a CRM, address book or anything else where they can be of use.

That’s why we built FullContact Card Reader (and Card Reader for Teams). Thinking that everyone should do away with business cards just because you don’t like them is idealist to the point of being completely unrealistic. Instead, we opted to make the process of turning cards into contacts incredibly easy. Just take a picture, then a real person will verify the information that’s on the card.

At FullContact, we’re all for big, hairy, audacious goals. But we also operate in the reality of the world today. That reality contains an awful lot of business cards, so give FullContact Card Reader a try and find out why it’s the best business card reader you can get.