I saw this on the “new apps” feed I subscribe to the other day. It just barely became available in the ‘States. The home page is here: FlipContact and the link to the Apple Store is here.

The app allows iPhone users to send their contact info to another iPhone user without wires, WiFi or even cell connectivity. It effectively makes your speaker and mic behave like a modem, sending and receiving the information via sound. It’s not terribly loud, so it’s not quite as annoying as those old modems were on connect. I haven’t tested it in a noisy environment, but since the idea is that phones be placed within an inch of each other, end to end, I don’t imagine any but the loudest of environments would keep this from working.

I tested this at work with one of my co-workers and found it to work quite quickly and effectively. There are other contact “beaming” apps for the iPhone, but all of those require users to be on the same WiFi SSID. This is a great solution to get around this requirement, even if it feels a little 20th century.