Glossary

The words used around NFC business cards

Ten terms that come up when you compare digital business cards, defined without marketing. Each one is short enough to quote on its own.

NFC: Near Field Communication, a radio standard that lets two devices exchange a small amount of data when they are a few centimetres apart. On a business card it holds one thing: a web address. The card carries no battery and stores no personal data.
NTAG: A family of NFC chips, NTAG213 to NTAG216, found in most cards and stickers. They differ in memory size, from roughly 144 to 888 bytes. Since a card only stores a web address, the smallest is enough.
vCard: The standard file format for a contact, with the extension .vcf. Opening one offers to add the person to the phone’s address book. LeadShake serves a vCard 3.0, the version both iOS and Android import without complaint.
Lead capture: Collecting the contact details of someone you met, with their agreement, so you can follow up. It is the reverse of a business card: instead of giving your details away, you record theirs.
QR fallback: A QR code shown alongside an NFC card so phones that cannot tap, or have NFC switched off, reach the same page with their camera. Any card that relies on NFC alone loses those visitors.
Campaign: In LeadShake, one card and the register that goes with it. Your account has a default campaign that never expires, and each Event Pass opens an extra one for 30 days so an event keeps its contacts separate.
Event Pass: A one off purchase, 19 EUR, that opens one extra campaign for 30 days. The 30 days only start when you activate it, so it can be bought before the event. It is a payment, not a subscription.
Data controller: Under GDPR, whoever decides why and how personal data is processed. When someone fills in your card page, you are the controller of that contact, because it is collected for your purposes.
Data processor: Under GDPR, whoever processes personal data on a controller’s instructions. LeadShake is the processor for the leads you capture: it stores, emails and exports them for you, and does nothing else with them.
Data enrichment: Completing a contact you collected by matching it against outside databases, often bought from data brokers. Several lead capture tools sell it as a feature. LeadShake does not do it, so a record only ever contains what the person typed.

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