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Would you like your friends, colleagues, relatives to receive your latest contact information without you notifying them?
Would you like to auto publish your modified (new) contact information to all your contacts whenever you make changes to your contact information (email, phn no, address e.t.c)?
You don't remember people whom you have shared your contact information with, but now you want them to know your latest contact information?
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This idea answers the above questions.
The idea is to get all the contacts in our mobile and or in our email clients updated whenever needed without having to receive it from the owner explicitly.
General Info:
In today's date all of the latest mobile phones allow you to send contacts from your mobile phones as a "Business Card"
The Business Card format contains all the information that a general contact information may have, eg Name, Address. Mobile no, res no, email etc.
You can create a mobile/email contact with your name and information in your mobile contacts and then send it as a business card to any other contact/number, this gets sent via sms.
This information that you can share is static i.e. if you change your own contact information in your mobile you will have to resend it to every other contact in your mobile so they get the updated information. Also it is possible that you may have shared your contact with someone whose contact is not with you but now you wnat him/her to be aware of your latest contact information.
Following is an IDEA to solve this problem that each of one is facing, I am in the process of standardizing it and is under development, I need your inputs to make this more useful. Your participation will be highly appreciated!!
:::::::SOLUTION :::::
How this may work:
- I publish my contact information via vCard (Business Card) to an Updatable vCard Service (uvCard Service, online web site).
- The uvCard Service gives me a unique code (only for internal purpose) and attaches the same to my uvCard.
- Now, I can send this uvCard of mine to anyone whom I want to share my contact info with.
- Once the uvCard is received by the recipients, it gets stored in their mobile contacts or in their email clients.
- Now, consider I change my mobile number and my home address. I update the changes online or republish it to uvCard service.
- People whom I have sent the uvCard can anytime use the contact manager in their mobile or email client if aware of of the uvCard service to update all the uvCards with the latest data. As the uvCard has an unique code attached to it, the data can be retrieved easily anytime when requested by the client software from the online uvCard service.
Note: This is an idea presented by me to receive responses from people on the same, if anything like this exist or has similarity with any existing copyrights/patents is just an matter of coincidence..
Request you to please rate this idea and add your valuable comments.
Thought by,
Bhupesh Naik
3 comments:
Hi Bhupesh
It's a very good idea! Just check out the following points:
1: vCard is proprietary software I think. And so far as I know, only Nokia phones seem to have this facility.
2: Why not give the user the option to regularly update the contact info; you know, like how anti-virus software regularly connects to the virus database server and updates the list?
3: If a user has to first check for new numbers of a contact before sending that person an SMS or calling him, then it will mean additional expense. So a regular update, say, weekly, will be useful.
4: So far as I know such a service is not available on cellphone networks. It's available on the net for email and other contact details.
5: Showing 'Private' numbers to other users, and then asking them to seek permission from the owners of those private numbers will be counterproductive. Also, there's the threat of privacy invasion, spam, tele-marketing calls etc.
6: If I understood correctly, you're planning to give each person a unique code no., which he'll use from his cell or email, to keep his contact details up-to-date on your server. So if I register, you'll give me a code (say, xyz123). If Vinod, as a friend, wants to update his cellphone with my new number, he'll have to sms my name and xyz123 to the server, right? Obviously, the xyz123 code shouldn't allow Vinod to update my contact details on the server... for that there should be another unique code, which only I have... could become complex... You may need to simplify the process, because a lot of lay users will be your customers...
7: Many people are not into GPRS yet, and are scared of connecting to the net thru their cells, because of the costs. I think simple SMS operations should work wonders...
But overall, very good idea, and has potential to be commercially successful, I think.
Omni_Vorous
vCard is a standard just like email MIME and all.
See this:
http://www.imc.org/pdi/vcardwhite.html
vCards are also supported by almost all of the latest mobile phones and email clients including outlook. You could see a menu option in the mobile contact's manager saying "Send as Business Card".
The user won't send sms to check if the contact is changed or not, its a one time call to the sevice to update the contacts.
Yes the spam stuff needs to be thought upon and a security layer needs to be built.
The code for each vCard will be all hidden and part of the software, the user does not have to remember any code other than his won that too only for logging in on the server. The softwares will take care to extract the code from the available contacts (cards) and send it via sms. e.g in your contact list you need to select a contact and just select a menu "Update", that is it!!
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Many thanks for your valuable comments this has helped.
Hi Bhupesh nice post though and i go with you on e vCards as it's more easy and reliable service.
I will love to hear from you on my blog as well.
Creativ Web Design.
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