It seems rather backward to have to give out business cards or recite out phone number, emails and addresses to share our contact details. To solve that pain point I built bizyQR. You enter your details and generate a QR-code that anyone can scan with their camera app and add your details.
Check it out here: https://vishnuunnikrishnan.github.io/bizyQR/
Now onto the part on my reasons for building this:
Introduction:
I enjoy programming, but I don’t really have any projects that I can proudly display. I wanted to change that and also to complete a project I started in 2017.
bizyQR sprang to life after I went to a solar tradeshow. The cost to use their QR scanner was $600. It was frankly insane. It was also atrocious and it didn’t allow people to share contacts easily. A third reason for this product was that we print so many business cards, using my method would make it environmentally friendly.
Finally when I originally conceived the idea I would add a backend server a a paid subscription service that would keep contact lists updated. I may build a back end server for this purpose one day but that depends on how much interest there is in this product.
Share your contact details via Native App?
In 2017 I built a native Android app, and began work on an iOS app. These are what they looked like. It was great and fully self contained. It had a scanner, a QR code generator and a way to update your details. Furthermore it had a way to add comments about your new contact.
They were nice apps, however I quickly realised that I had a few issues. The iOS app had a blurry QR code, and for the android app to use the scanner the user had to allow seperate permissions. This combined with that fact that I would have to update each app separately every time the OS updated meant that I quickly lost interest in releasing these applications. What ultimately dissuaded me from releasing the apps was that on iOS where I expect the majority of my future income to come from, the cost of a developer license was $99 a year. At that point in my life I didn’t have a cent to spend.
Share your contact details via Web App
In 2019, I realised that both Google and Apple both supported QR scanning directly from the camera app. Further they could both natively understand the open and rather poorly names VCard format. I decided to take on a one day project to build a fully functioning web app that achieved the majority of my ambitions in 2017. Further in our privacy conscious world I wanted to build something that worked completely locally and would transmit no data to the server or to a third party.
This is a fully working web application and because there is absolutely no cost to keeping it online it will run forever (as long as github lasts). I’ve used the local storage api to make sure that the data is stored in the cache and it’ll be present as long as the user does not clear their cache.
Usage
Using this application is simple. Just enter your details and click “Generate QR Code. The data is saved locally and a QR code will be the first thing you see on subsequent visits to the page.
Conclusion
Do your bit for the environment and make your life easier at the same time. Give BizyQR a go!