Jun 28, 2010

Talking greeting cards are so yesterdayBy Richard MullinsHickoryRecord.com

There’s a new reason to get a little bit weepy looking through the greeting card aisles.

It’s not the heart-warming poems on a Mother’s Day card, or tearful “atta-boys” for a first-born’s graduation.

There’s a new breed of multimedia electronic cards coming on the market that more closely re-semble something you’d buy in a BestBuy store than at Hallmark.

Cards with recordable karaoke soundtracks. Cards with augmented reality links online. Cards with animated color LCD screens that display snappy vignettes from “Star Wars” about fatherhood – for Father’s Day. Cards with a sticker price of $10 to $30 and a do-not-recycle-with-the-newspaper warning on the back.

A mere “Thinking of You” card with a kitten-in-a-basket photo, these are not.

Perhaps it’s our HDTV-loaded culture that judges everything in dots-per-inch and megabits-per-second. Or perhaps this is an inevitable overture by cardmakers to the snap-and-post phone/camera/Facebook nation. But multimedia greeting cards are selling fast, and they’re well on the way to becoming standard, and expected.

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