vCard standards empower over 2.5 billion people and devices to exchange digital contact information daily. With the further digitization of society and a corresponding increase in exchange mediums, it is necessary to maintain the currency of the vCard standards. In addition, the vCard standards today largely only support North American and Western European address formats, which are not relevant to other parts of the world. We aim not to only address use cases, technologies and concerns that are increasingly important to today’s world, but to innovate and drive vCard standards to help create a better, safer and more interoperable future for our children.

Localization and internationalization. The current vCard standards are tailored to the US and mostly Western European address formats, yet these regions represent less than 20% of the adopted population. In order to break through existing barriers to further adoption across the globe, it is necessary to ensure that the vCard standards and methods of exchange are equally useful for all cultures.

Security and privacy concerns. Cybersecurity is now ranked as the number one risk to financial markets, and privacy is increasingly an important topic with regards to human rights and compliance regulations globally. vCard data, which carries digital contact information, can contain sensitive and valuable data that could pose serious risks to the operator that processes or stores them, or even to the data subject himself/herself. We will investigate possible solutions with regards to vCard authenticity, confidentiality and integrity.

Official usage. While vCard is the definitive format of digital contact exchange in the consumer world, it is not the case within businesses or governments. We aim to bridge this gap by improving vCard into the definitive format and exchange mechanism of digital contact information for official usage.

New exchange medium. Online interaction is increasingly performed through social networks and messaging platforms that are different from Email, CardDAV and Internet exchanges. For users it is most useful to standardize a consistent user experience in digital contact exchange across various exchange mediums to ensure interoperability.

Supplement paper business card exchanges. Since paper cards will not disappear tomorrow, we aim to supplement and reduce physical exchanges of paper cards by bridging the vCard standards to the physical domain.

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Peter Tam, Ribose (peter.tam@ribose.com)

Ronald Tse, Ribose (tse@ribose.com)

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