VCard burst

One common experience in using a mobile phone is when you need to communicate a third party's telephone number. A typical example might be:


 * Alice: Hey Bob, what's Eve's phone number?
 * Bob: Oh.. I have it in my phone, but I have to hang up to retreive it.

So then Bob hangs up the phone, looks in his address book, copies down Eve's number and call's Alice back.

Admittedly, mobile phone UIs have come a long way in recent years and most modern phones let you look in your address book without hanging up. But even after Bob reads off Eve's number, Alice still has to manually make a new entry. This isn't necessary. A properly designed mobile device could send data over the GSM voice channel; data like a vCard. This way Alice and Bob could share vCard contacts without so much hanging up and manual data entry. In short, Eve's contact information is already in a digital form on Bob's phone, why not just copy that data directly to Alice's?

So an experience of the vCard Bursting might be something like this:


 * Alice: Hey Bob, what's Eve's phone number?
 * Bob (looking through his address book) : Okay... I've got the vCard here... does your phone do bursting?
 * Alice: yup.
 * Bob: Okay... here it comes. (bob then presses the "burst" key or menu item)
 * Bob's Phone: BZZRRRKK! KRRRFFFWWWPPTT!
 * Alice's Phone: You have received a vCard for "Eve" from the person you're talking to. Accept? Yes. No. (Alice then accepts the vCard)
 * Alice: Thanks Bob!

This technique could also be enhanced to send a FOAF reference (like my Linked In! or OpenFOAF URLs.) The Meishi System in the early 2000's used nonces on business cards for a similar purpose.