Formats and protocols - requirements and efforts in establishing formats and standards for exchanging electronic business card information - one of several articles on Personal Data Interchange technologies

RELease 1.0, Sept 23, 1993 by Jerry Michalski

The address on a standard US business letter usually conforms to a predictable format, because the sender's desire to get the letter to its destination usually outweighs his compulsion to be on the aesthetic edge -- yet letter addresses are still tough to OCR (Just ask any postal service!).

Business cards are far less predictable. They're a place where personalities manifest themselves, so they vary widely and include many creative and hard-to-recognize elements. Often the point is to stand out, which makes some cards undecipherable by even the best business-card reading systems.

In the face of all this artistic expression of personality, the exchange of electronic business cards seems quite flat: People become records in a database; who wants that? The key to a functional and pervasive electronic standard is not only to keep the expressiveness, but perhaps to add new kinds of value as well as new forms of expression. The image of two people meeting and beaming business cards at each other seems a little funny because it is a little funny. Luckily, that is not the central goal of PDI.

When someone leaves a company, what's the first thing he makes sure he takes? His Rolodex.

One way that PDI outshines business cards is when you're not there in person, as in a telephone conversation or even a voicemail message (see Radish, page 22). Why dictate your name over and over, and still receive misspelled correspondence? A soft key on your phone can automatically send your data to the receiving device.

Another benefit is giving people more ways of contacting you. For example, people often end their e-mail messages with a "signature." Naturally, these include other elements such as the person's favorite quote or Joke. But they also often have voice and fax numbers. Why can't these automatically ragister in your address book, allowing you to reply in the manner most appropriate to your situation, without having to send an e-mail reply asking for a fax number? This information could also be part of the message envelope, as with Talescript.

Ingredients

How much information should the standard define? The obvious place to start is with your name, physical and e-mail addresses and phone and fax numbers, yet even these are elements you may not want to gre out all the time. You may also wear several hats at work, or consult for different companies, so flexible titles or multiple business cards would make sense. (Are you the president of a holding company or editor of a newsletter? Would you rather show yourself as a general partner in a vc firm or as the chairman of one of its troubled investments? What about your Job as the parent of three kids and pillar of the community?)

Once you get past the obvious, things get out of hand quickly, but expressiveness reigns. Your electronic business or calling card could include a digital signature or voiceprint for authentication. your office hours or a pointer to your electronic calendar, the company logo (and Jingle!), your picture (dressed appropriately for the season, of course). directions to your office or home (including a map), or even animation. People are putting all sorts of things in their X.500 directory entries, including their favorite drinks (see Release 1.0, 4-93). Finally, the card could include font. placement and display instructions.

Excuse me, do you have an eCard?

Practical PDI requires that devices know what information to expect and what format it will be in. At GO (now EO), Telephony Architect Roland Alden has been working on a practical and forward-thinking format-and-protocol specification called eCard, complete with a slot for a corporate 1ogo and pronunciation guide (that's Ma-'call-skl), if desired. His work on eCard was inspired by noticing that many companies were working on ways to store and "beam" this information, but nobody was working to make it easily machine readable and ubiquitous. His draft eCard standard is available, and open for comments now (see Resources, page 25).

Clearly, a standard such as eCard could find many uses and even affect behaviors in ways such as the ones described earlier. As an example, Alden describes the following scenario.

Think of a business card as a capability address. By giving you a business card I give you a certain kind of permission to reach me. I may give you a card with my home phone number for instance, and I may give a different card to someone else. More specifically, an eCard could contain an encrypted token. When you attempt to contact me, by phone, e-mail or whatever, you present the eCard I gave you. This identifies you to me, and my voicemail (or e-mail) system may take special action because it knows who you are. Thus, eCard exchange becomes an enabler for a form of cryptotraphically secure and authenticated Caller ID that exists in a protocol layer above "the network" and beyond the reach of regulatory agencies -- because we identify ourselves this way by mutual agreement.

Providing identifying information outside the phone network sidesteps many of the political and practical problems with Caller ID and other network-based services. It also aids compatibility with other communication systems such as e-mail, cellular and cable -- if they also adopt the standard.