RFID and business card information

Abstract

Business cards are a popular way to exchange contact information. They are practical if the information is needed right away but after some time the cards get lost or at least finding right person's information is difficult. Saving all this information in digital form would make things more practical. Our goal was to implement a system that would enable usage of information on a business card without need of manual typing. We decided to use vCard standard as a way of storing the information in digital form and RFID technology as a way of storing it physically. We came to notice that as vCard standard supports a variety of multimedia and it may not fit on a RFID tag in some cases. We evaded this problem by storing just a link that points to the actual vCard file. The realized implementation is relatively simple; a link is read from a RFID tag using a mobile phone connected to a RFID reader by Bluetooth, a vCard file is downloaded from a web server according to the received link and the user is prompted if the information should be stored to the phone's address book or if a call should be placed. The ideal situation would be that the RFID reader would be integrated to the phone, but this implementation was the best we could do with the tools at our disposal.