Adding vCard Barcodes to Business Cards

The use of vCards to enable easy import/export of address book entries has become common place. In most instances, vCards are transferred by email, but did you know that vCards can also be transferred using two dimensional barcodes?

This article discusses how to implement a 2D barcode to enable business card scanners or smartphones to obtain your vCard.

What is a QR code?

A QR code is a 2D barcode.

qr code

This barcode contains a URL link.

Print and Resolution Issues

Although a vCard can be entirely contained in a QR code, the resulting barcode can be large, requiring sufficient physical size in order for a scanner or barcode reader to scan and decode accurately. We found that due to the size limits of a business card, it is not possible to place a vCard QR code.

The solution is to minimise the amount of data in the QR code. But what about the vCard data? The answer here, is to put the vCard data into a file and allow it to be downloaded from your website. In this case the QR code only needs to contain the URL to the vCard file. To improve the data size further, a short URL service such as Goo.gl can be used.

Server File Type

Many web servers are not configured to return the correct MIME type for vCards. A MIME of 'text/x-vcard' should be used for files with .vcf extension. Without this, many web browsers will simply output the file contents to the screen, and not prompt to download the file.

Device Support

Even when the correct MIME type is defined, unfortunately, some combinations of browsers and operating systems do not support vCard file download from a website. Currently, this includes iPhone and Android devices. Hopefully, this will be addressed soon by those vendors. In the meantime, an appropriate solution is to detect the browsers that are not supported and redirect to a page that allows an email address to be entered. The vCard can be sent as an attachment. In most cases, including mobile devices, vCard email attachments can be added to an address book successfully.

Resources

The following resources were used in the creation of this article:

http://2d-code.co.uk/qr-code-business-card
http://2d-code.co.uk/three-rules-of-qr-codes
http://www.ehow.com/how_5843286_make-vcard-website.html
http://www.fastcompany.com/1585822/business-card-just-scan-my-qr-code
http://goo.gl/
http://ledfrog.com/blog/2010/04/using-digital-barcodes-on-your-business-cards/
http://microformats.org/wiki/rfc-2426
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCard
http://www.thesheep.co.uk/2007/06/15/forcing-vcard-downloads-on-the-web