DEMO: WayConnected replaces your business card

WayConnected is one of 70 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2010 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After our selection, the companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

We’re inundated with usernames, Twitter handles, Facebook pages, addresses, phone numbers, and emails. It’s hard to keep up with our own, let alone others’. Trading contact information with someone isn’t as easy as it used to be when your business card could fit all your details. WayConnected, launching at DEMO today, looks to solve this problem of contact abundance.

To unify your information, the service makes use of a WayID — a simple handle which gates access to all your usernames, phone numbers, addresses, websites, and every other piece of information that can be used to reach out to you. Creating a WayID is as simple as filling out a form on the site’s homepage, and following a few steps to enter all the information.

The service isn’t just about sharing your contact information, but also keeping track of others. For this, you can send requests to other WayID users — perhaps someone you met, or through search — and make them a contact. Once they approve your request, both parties can categorize each other’s relationships into “friends,” “family,” or “work.”

Privacy is key when sharing information with others. Perhaps you only want friends and family to see your phone number, or hide certain information from certain types of groups. The service makes it simple to do this by providing a setting for every type of information you enter into it, and also has the ability to let you manage people individually in terms of what they can see, and can’t.

By letting you simplify your contact details in one place and making it easy to control and manage others’, the service hopes to abandon the need to carry a business card anywhere. While the contact management space is a crowded one — with everything from Facebook to LinkedIn, Plaxo, and the contacts feature on your phone as popular competitors — it’s hope is to be simple and secure enough to be the one-stop shop for your contact details.

WayConnected is self-funded, and based out of Golden, Colorado. The 10-employee startup is led by Jim Behrens, formerly president of Orb Networks, a media-sharing startup.