bdominy

She gave a talk at TechCrunch last year and kindly spoke to me briefly afterwards about how end-to-end encryption can help businesses. The problem is that without a huge benefactor, there isn’t enough consumer demand to make a sustainable business out of privacy concerns.

This helps with the initial exchange of contact information, but keeping it updated for the people that have it is a real challenge, especially if you want to avoid using social media.

If you have an audience in mind, try meeting them in person to demo your solution. I've found people are most receptive when they see your passion and resolve.

"By offering end-to-end encryption they can give power back to the users and simultaneously simplify their regulatory burden."

This is exactly why I use e2ee in my app. I sleep better knowing that the keys to the castle are not solely in my hands, but rather with each user. They will always have a say in how their data is used because they ultimately control access.

Actually, I have an option in Neucards' settings that adds a Contacts tab which lets you access your phone's contacts directly within Neucards. I agree people should not need to go back and forth to find what they are looking for.

It does work without the app. You can display a QR code on your phone's screen to let people see and act on your contact info even if they don't have Neucards installed. In fact, I use my wife's android phone all the time for testing. You can also set up card types to just share certain info, like professional, personal, family, friends, etc.

The tap cards do not have a QR code printed on them because I create an access key dynamically when you activate the tap card.

Yes. LinkedIn is, in my experience, the go to way of connecting at conferences. I should mention, though, that one feature I really like myself in Neucards is location tagging when you exchange your digital card. This lets me see months later not just when, but also where, I met someone and makes it much easier to remember the context around the exchange.

Yes, for the NFC tags you will need an internet connection, but the Neucards app does maintain a local cache of the digital cards you have received. You can view the details of those cards and kick off an action, like make a call or send an email, by just tapping on the info. Updates occur when I edit my card or account information and notifications are sent to the list of recipients for my card. Neucards does a sync at launch or when triggered by a notification.

As for adding info to the phone contacts, this is a tricky situation. Right now, I do not sync the contact info from received cards into the contacts on the phone. This is because the contacts on the phone are a shared resource that other apps can access, and I don't want people's contact info to leak. I do support caller identification, so you will see a person's name rather than just a number when they call for all of the numbers on your received cards. But, this isn't as robust of an experience as having all the info in the phone's contacts.

That looks very useful! I like your focus on privacy. Thanks for sharing.

Thank you! I'm glad you like the idea.

For sharing with others who don't have the app, the link you send lets them see your card's contact information on the neucards' website which they can act on. So, for example, I typically share my phone number, linked in profile, twitter handle, etc. and that works faster for me than just giving someone my number and texting them the rest. Also, by using card types, you can set up multiple cards (Professional, Personal, Friends, Minimal, etc.) and then have more control over what info you share initially.

I'm very much hoping to add Android and making neucards as universal as possible. Open sourcing would definitely help with that, but I'm taking a wait and see approach. The physical nfc tags were just added and if people embrace them, then it would make that approach more viable.