Setting up the NFC.cool digital business card

A paper business card is a frozen artefact. The minute your job title changes, your phone number changes, or you move agencies, every card in someone’s wallet becomes wrong information about you.

The NFC.cool digital business card flips that around: one URL that you control, written to an NFC tag (or a QR code, or both). You edit your details on your phone, and every existing tag updates instantly. Here’s how to set it up.

Install the app

Download NFC.cool Business Card for iPhone or Android. It’s a free download on both platforms.

Build the source contact in Contacts

You can start from an empty card in the app, or from a contact on your phone. For the second, open the iOS Contacts (or Android contacts) app and create a contact for yourself with the details you want available to the world: name, organisation, job title, work email, work phone, website, LinkedIn URL. Double-check spelling and formatting - this is the master record.

You don’t need to put everything in. Anything sensitive (personal mobile, home address) can stay off this contact entirely.

Open NFC.cool Business Card and create the card

Open the app and tap Create Business Card.

Choose Create from Contacts and select the contact you just built, or Create New to start from an empty card. NFC.cool pulls the data in and shows it as your draft business card.

Pick which fields are public

This is the most important step. You can untick any field you don’t want shared - if your Contacts entry has a personal mobile number you’d rather keep private, untick it here and it won’t appear on your shared card.

Common loadouts:

• Sales: name, title, work phone, work email, company, LinkedIn.

• Engineering: name, title, work email, GitHub, website.

• Creative: name, title, Instagram, portfolio URL, work email.

Move on when you’re done. You’ll then pick a username, which goes at the end of your card’s link (mycard.nfc.cool/John), and create your account. The app gives your account a four-digit PIN, which you can change in Settings and use to keep a card private.

Customise the logo

Open the card’s menu and change the logo to upload your company logo or personal mark. A transparent background gives the cleanest result, and you can use one logo for both light and dark mode or add one for each.

Write the URL to an NFC tag

1. Write to NFC Tag. It's in the card's menu. Hold your phone to the tag and the short link is written.

Now the physical side. Any standard NFC tag works - sticker, card, keyring, whatever form factor fits. My recommended NFC tags page shows what to buy.

In the card’s menu, tap Write to NFC Tag (Write Business Card to NFC Tag on Android). Hold your phone against the tag. The app writes a short URL pointing at your card page on nfc.cool. Once it’s written, anyone with a phone can tap it.

If you want to lock the tag so no one can overwrite the URL later, NFC.cool Tools can do that with its Platinum subscription. Locking is irreversible - only lock tags you’re sure about.

Preview before sharing

1. What they see. On iPhone a native App Clip, with Save Contact one tap away.

Tap Preview in the card’s menu (Preview Business Card on Android) to see exactly what a recipient sees. The page is mobile-first, loads instantly, and offers a one-tap “Save Contact” button. On iOS, recipients see a native App Clip (no app install required); on Android they see a clean web page on the nfc.cool domain. Both end up with your contact in their address book.

Why this beats a vCard QR

The classic alternative is a QR code with a vCard embedded directly. It works without any service in the middle - the QR encodes the contact data itself.

The trade-off: it can’t be updated. Print 500 cards, change your job, and you’ve got 500 cards with stale data.

The NFC.cool flow keeps your contact details on the server. The tag (or QR) just points at the URL. You change your details once in the app; every tag everyone has ever tapped now resolves to the updated info.

That’s the only feature that matters for serious networking - the data outlasts the printed card.

NFC.cool Tools (iPhone) · NFC.cool Tools (Android) · or NFC.cool Business Card for iPhone and Android.