format for data on nfc business cards

1
votes

Apologies in advance if this question is a bit low end - I am only a quarter tech savy.

I am trying to produce some NFC enabled business cards and have been trialling some Mifare 1K compatible and also ultralight cards. I have been encoding the data using a Tag writer app via a Samsung GS3 and it seems to be performing well (ie when contact occurs the GS3 seamlessly asks which email account I would like to add the contact card too without requiring a particular installed app etc.

My question relates to a universal format for contact data that can allow the same type of outcome as occurred with the GS3 above with other phone formats when they inevitably become NFC enabled (ie Blackberry, Windows phone and the next I-phone). I have been reading about .VCF or Vcard as being the universal format however when I have encoded a mifare card with a contact card in this format and tried to get by GS3 to read it, the phone asks which application I would like to use. Is there a format I can use which will allow all phones to process and ask where the user would like to save the data without a tagreader app or similar?

Thanks Brad

1
nfc
Correct me if I am wrong, is this programming related? – wtsang02
I would say yes. The question is about choosing the correct data format for maximum interoperability. NFC related questions often tend enter this gray area between programming, software or device related and, sometimes, electronics. SO is home to many more of such questions. – NFC guy
Yes agree this is perhaps more of a programming question. One simplistic solution is to encode the nfc enabled card say two or three times in formats such as .csv, .vcf so that irrespective of what device the customer is using they get that seemless experience. Only problem there is I need a big step up in NFC chip size to 2 - 4 k. Any help anyone can provide would be greatly appreciated – user2036421

1 Answers

0
votes

Unfortunately, there isn't a format that's universal for vCard on NFC tags. The closest thing to it is using a MIME type within the NDEF payload and referencing the vCard spec. The problem with this approach is that every cellphone OS or manufacturer may implement this differently.

The details lie in how the NFC standards body, NFC Forum, has not explicitly defined vCard as a Well Known Type. The format that data is stored on NFC tags is called NDEF. The NDEF specification lays out a structure and provides a TNF field to select WKF, MIME, EXT, and others. These TNF values map to what applications should process the NDEF data. In the case of WKT, typically a native application knows what to do with it (this is what you are asking for). However, WKT currently only specifies the following structures:

The Basics of NDEF

  1. Text
  2. URI
  3. Smart Poster
  4. Handover
  5. Generic Control
  6. Signature

Since there's no WKT for vCard, what Samsung's GS3 app is doing is using a MIME type. MIME has a similar structure to NDEF but not managed by the NFC Forum so Windows, Blackberry, etc. might choose to implement the vCard structure in a different way (using an EXT type, for instance) and still be NFC Forum compliant.

More about breaking down NDEF here.