The Average Jo Blog

Now that I’m living in Austin I figured I should get some kind of cool business cards for meetups and business stuff.  But I thought “really how often do people actually hold on to your card and put your information in their phone?” I figure its really low because I get business cards and never put that person in my iPhone much less keep the card for a long time.  There are apps for sharing information like bump, but both people have to have the application for it to work. Also I really don’t like carrying a lot of stuff around with me. So why not have your card on your phone and share you contact info with people through a QR code? People are already adding QR codes to their paper business cards. How about just getting rid of the paper card all together?

Solution! An iPhone app that contains all your information in a QR code!

So basically what I did was make a simple .php page with a .jpg of a business card. The card has a QR code that when scanned would populate a Vcard and allow the user to save the info directly to their contacts. To make it a little bit nicer with a little code I made the page act like a native app for iPhone.

iPhone Business Card (scan the QR and see what happens.)

After scanning the QR the contact info populates in your iPhone allowing you to save the info into a new or existing contact. 

To make it easy for me to launch the card I created a custom icon and saved the web app to my screen via safari’s “add to Home Screen” option.  Now the web app looks and acts like a native iPhone app. 

Now I don’t have to carry around a stack of business cards and I know for a fact that someone will have my information because it was easy for them to save it to their smart phone. 

Do you think this is better than carrying around business cards and messing with special applications like bump?

-If a lot of people are interested in making their own card app I’ll put together a tutorial, just leave a comment below.