#Beacon vcard software Bluetooth

Business cards, for all their faults, provide a physical memento of an interaction.Not as big a business card holder, true, but not quite small enough for a key-ring. Similarly, QR Codes will last ask long as their ink sticks to paper. NFC has no battery - it is powered by the phone - so should last forever. BLE beacons should last 2 - 5 years on a single coin cell. ( *mutters darkly about how QR codes only need a camera lens. Just like NFC - you need a phone with the right chips in it. You can't directly embed an email address, phone number, or BitCoin link - just web.

I've suggested using a 7-bit alphabet, but it seems that the preferred solution is to use a URl shortener. More expensive than NFC, but you keep the beacon rather than hand them out.

The Physical Web specification is still evolving - and this BLE Business Card idea isn't without problems. One click (either in notification or app) and it takes you directly to a website with my digital business card. Or, you can open up the app and see a list of nearby beacons. If you have Android's Physical Web app, or iOS Chrome - your phone should display a persistent notification showing all the nearby beacons. It spends all day broadcasting that message via BLE. I carry around a Physical Web beacon on my keyring. Rather than just broadcasting an ID, it (ab)uses the Advertising Packets to broadcast a URl! How It Works Google's Physical Web project does something much more interesting with iBeacon technology. The typical use case is that it alerts your Coffee Shop's app as to which branch you are in. When your phone hears the broadcast, it looks up the ID and does something with it.

#Beacon vcard software Bluetooth

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is a version of Bluetooth which is specifically designed to be efficient at broadcasting small amounts of data.Īn iBeacon simply transmits an ID number via BLE. There are a lot of misconceptions around iBeacons. Is there some way to turn them into a high-tech business card? While there, I was lucky enough to grab a few 'Physical Web' beacons from Ilario Gressi of Google.

Last week I was at the Over The Air hackference. What if we change the idea of what a business card is? Why do I need to hand over a physical bit of dead tree in order to exchange contact information? That's dumb. The NFC cards are £1.20 each - the regular cards cost just 26p each! As regular readers know, I'm not a great fan of NFC - mostly because it's so expensive. I notice that Moo are now selling NFC enabled business cards. At the time, it was the easiest way to get VCARD information from a physical card and onto a phone. Four years ago, I wrote an article for Moo.com about using QR Codes on business cards.