[Current version]: Beta v0.1
Traditionally, paper-made business cards are in use to exchange contacts with a new friend or a business partner. Besides obvious disadvantages including but not limited to the need to carry business cards and consumption of tons of paper, paper-made cards yet remain a primary way for spreading business information about a company or an individual. Rapid evolution of technologies gave birth to a myriad of applications and tools (including Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter) that nowadays people use for putting a name to a face. Nevertheless, a common drawback to mention is that all these applications store users’ personal information and do not provide high level of confidentiality.
CardBook is a trustless contact exchange platform seeking to handle the growing concerns over data privacy and security. The creation of more sustainable ways of interaction is another goal that was set to achieve with Cardbook, which empowers users to exchange personal data without using any kind of paper or other materials.
To learn more about the environmental implications of using paper-made business cards as compared to using CardBook application, please see our paper titled "A two-stage comparative life cycle assessment of paper-based and software-based business cards", which was published in the proceedings of SEIT 2015 conference.
When the “exchange” button in the application is clicked the system locates the current GPS coordinates of the users and instantly exchanges their information over the internet in a completely secure manner. Compared to other business-oriented social networking services, CardBook concentrates on a simple yet powerful idea to empower users with a clear, easy, trustless and sustainable way to exchange business and contact details.
This respository containts the implementation of the CardBook application for Android platform. Just download the files, import into your Android studio and build. Please contact us if you face any difficulties with the installation or havy any questions/comments regarding the code. Currently, you won't be able to use the CardBook application as our servers are down :( We are looking forward to bringing them back up and running !CardBook is a collaborative project. The future releases of this application will be dedicated to creating more advanced GUI features and expanding the functionalities.
Contributors are more than welcome ! Although, if you plan to put a non-trivial amount of work into coding new features, it is recommended that you first contact me.
MIT- Areg Karapetyan
- Waheeb Yaqub
- Bob Liu