How much time have you spent this week leafing through chaotic address books, sifting through piles of business cards or looking through old email messages for names, addresses, numbers or other contact details?

And when you make new contacts, how do you synchronise your address book, your diary, your mobile phone number list (if you have one) and your list of email addresses on your PC? At work and at home, as people use more communications media, there is a growing need for standardised contacts lists, and a new specification called vCard may provide just that.

In a nutshell, vCards are electronic business cards. Besides containing all the usual information of a business card your name, company name, phone and email details they also take advantage of new media to provide a lot more information. Why not, for example, put your picture on your business card, and a snippet of voice so your name can be pronounced? Or add a live link to your company's Website, ready to be clicked, and multiple language support, and even the flashiest paper-based business cards begin to look dated.

Before getting carried away, it's worth remembering electronic products don't always beat paper. A printed sheet of names and addresses is a lot easier to carry than even the slimmest palmtop organiser. But keeping an address book organised is a nightmare for anyone collecting lots of contacts

how do you categorise companies, or how do you fit another Murphy onto the already full page of Murphys? Electronic lists are more easily searched too, and if you still want a paper copy, you can regularly print one.

Electronic address books, or contacts managers, are potentially much more flexible than paper, but up till now there has been a problem: standards. Nobody wants to go to the bother of entering all their contacts into a personal organiser, only to find that two years down the line the information cannot be easily transferred to another type of contacts manager, especially given the growing popularity of personal organisers and palmtop computers. Hence the need for standards. Hence vCards.

The idea of electronic business cards first came from the Versit consortium, which was founded in 1994 by Apple Computer, AT&T, IBM, and Siemens. Versit specified vCard, a standard electronic business card, and vCalendar, a specification for standard electronic scheduling, as part of what is known as personal data interchange. Since then the two specifications have been managed by the Internet Mail Consortium (IMC), an international organisation promoting the use of email on the Internet.

IMC's membership includes America Online, Sun Microsystems, IBM, Microsoft, Netscape and Hewlett-Packard.

Unlike paper business cards, vCards are sent electronically, and although they can be printed, their real power is their ability to carry more information than a paper card. IMC says they can contain names, addresses, multiple phone numbers, email addresses, and Web addresses, also known as URLs. On top of this they carry graphics and multimedia, such as a company logos, photographs and audio clips. They also carry time zone information so others know when to contact you, and they support multiple languages.

Most importantly, because vCards are now a standard supported by many mailers and browsers, they can be sent across many networks and machines. They could be used to exchange contact information between participants at a business meeting, using infra-red links between laptops or hand-held organisers, or could be used to append all your contact details in email messages.

Down the line, using computer telephony or GSM mobile phones, vCards could be used to give your details to answering machines or to call centre operators, increasing efficiency and reducing errors.

Many manufacturers, including Lotus, Netscape, Microsoft and 3Com, are already supporting or planning to support vCards in their products. Microsoft, for example, already supports them in its Outlook '98 mail client, which is being distributed free from its Website until the end of June.

Mr David Bennie, Microsoft's product marketing manager for Britain and Ireland, says Outlook '98 has a contacts manager, which he says is useful for lists of up to about 5,000 entries. He says Outlook can import contact information from other Microsoft products including Excel, Access and the slimmed-down Windows CE operating system for palmtop PCs. He says the vCard standard is already supported, even though the standards bodies themselves have yet to formally certify it.

The catch, as ever with Microsoft, is the need to upgrade. Older PCs with only 8MB of RAM will struggle to run Outlook '98 , while palmtop users will need Windows CE version 2.0 installed. As with so many new IT products, users will have to decide for themselves if the frustration and cost of constant upgrades are prices worth paying for inter-operability and progress.

But with infra-red interfaces now being built into the latest GSM mobile phones, the day can't be far away when a single contacts list can be maintained across your desktop, palmtop, and mobile phone, with a paper copy printed out for those unwired moments. For good measure, a copy could be deposited in a secure location on the Web, so that your contacts list can be accessed from anywhere with Web access. No more rummaging through loose bits of paper for that elusive phone number.

Eoin Licken can be reached at eoin@stilet.to

Electronic business cards compared to paper:

Can contain much more information, including photo, sound, and graphics.

Easier to give accurate details to answering machines or customer support centres.

Contacts lists can be easily searched.

Easy to keep contacts lists synchronised between desktop, laptop, palmtop and mobile phone.

Easily sent contacts information via email, Web pages, or infra-red links.