Ever look at the pile of business cards on your desk and wish there were a better way to reach out to potential contacts? Gabe Zichermann is one step ahead of you. His new company, text-messaging service RmbrME, is billing itself as a greener alternative to paper business cards. (To listen to our conversation with Gabe, click here.)

SLM: So how does RmbrME work?

Gabe: RmbrME is a pretty straightforward service. Sign up for an account and link it to whichever social networking sites you use - LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. (RmbrME supports all of them). When you meet someone you'd like to exchange information with, you simply text "rmbrme" with the phone number or email address of the person you'd like to contact. That person then receives an instant invitation from which they can connect with you on any social networking site that they choose and also access your contact information.

The service grew out of a simple frustration that I had with the tremendous waste associated with paper business cards. I looked at the business card and thought, "Wow, this really serves an incredibly brief purpose. I just take it back to my office and copy down the information into my computer." People go to conferences and come back with piles of business cards that eventually end up in the trash.

RmbrME was born out of the desire to eliminate that paper waste, making the connection seamless, and also making the experience much more real-time than it is today.

SLM: It sounds like the service would be great for younger demographics, which are particularly active on social networking sites. But a lot of higher-level businesspeople tend to be older and may not be quite online yet with web 2.0. What's your response to businesspeople who want to make sure they'll be able to reach out to everyone they meet.

Gabe: I think no matter how old you are, if you're in the professional world you want to make the best possible impact that you can. The purpose of leaving a paper business card with someone is to have them actually follow up with you. In today's socially networked world, that's much more likely to happen if an online invitation is waiting for them the next time they log on. A digital business card not only improves the chances that someone will connect with you but also allows that user to bypass the whole step of entering your information into their computer.

In addition, I find that as I get older - and as I meet more people - I sometimes have a difficult time remembering who people are. I'm just not as likely to reach out unless I have some context to apply to the phone number in my address book or the email address in my inbox. So RmbrME was also born out of the knowledge that I'm much more likely to make a valuable connection if I have some context for a given business contact. Overall, it's a vast improvement over the current process.

As a side note, I believe that LinkedIn, the networking site for business professionals, has about 5 million users per month. That not an insubstantial number.

SLM: That's the usability pitch. How about the green pitch, which you alluded to earlier?

Gabe: This is a very personal thing for me - I've been involved with environmental causes at the grassroots level for quite a long time. I'm really frustrated by the way we use paper in society in general, and that extends to business cards. Like any other professional person, I'm amassing hundreds of paper business cards a year. I'm also recycling or throwing out hundreds of my own business cards a year because the contact information changes or the corporate logo gets an overhaul. Many employees at large companies are forced to order a minimum of a thousand business cards when they're only using 50 a year.

I've run some numbers on this, and my super-conservative estimate is that we in the U.S. are consuming 250,000-400,000 trees a year just to print paper business cards. That's a lot of paper for something that is so temporary and, at this point, completely anachronistic. Its whole purpose these days is to get me to enter contact information on my computer. That is the definition of wasteful.

We all walk around with mobile phones that are equipped with text-messaging capability. We designed RmbrME to be a lowest-common-denominator service that works with every cellphone, every service plan, with every carrier. You don't need to know what kind of service your contact uses, or what kind of phone they have. It works all the time, everywhere, without consuming any paper.