Guides

Trade show lead capture is how an exhibiting team records the people it meets at a show, and what each of them needs, so sales can follow up. There are two routes: rent the show’s lead retrieval app, which decodes that show’s badges into registration data, or bring your own app, which works at every event but, unless you also pay for the show’s badge API, reads only what a badge prints or a visitor chooses to share. Some universal apps connect to that API, but the access is sold per show and costs more than a license for the show’s app.

On the 2026–27 order forms we checked, a single phone-app license for the show’s app costs $255 to $540 per show, and five reps on the app route pay $815 to $1,200 before tax and fees. Rent when you exhibit once or twice a year or need the full registration record. Bring your own when you exhibit often, meet people away from the booth, or want one workflow at every event. The two routes can also work side by side.

A digital business card for WhatsApp is a card link you can paste into any chat, group, Status, or profile. It opens in the other person’s browser with no app to install, shows your details with a Save Contact button, and carries a WhatsApp button — a wa.me link — that opens a chat with you in one tap. Its QR code covers the conversations that start in person.

That is a lot of reach for one link. WhatsApp has more than 3 billion monthly users worldwide, Mark Zuckerberg said on Meta’s first-quarter 2025 earnings call, as TechCrunch reported — and it is no longer just an overseas habit: the year before, he put the app at more than 100 million monthly active users in the United States, according to TechCrunch. If your clients, suppliers, or prospects message you there, your card should work there.

An Apple Wallet business card is a pass — the same kind of object as a boarding pass or a concert ticket — that carries your digital business card’s QR code and lives in the Wallet app on your iPhone. It is not a contact file, it never sits in anyone’s address book, and the person you share it with installs nothing. You raise the pass, they point their camera, your card opens in their browser.

That one distinction — a pass, not a contact — answers most of the questions people bring to this topic, and it is the part almost every explanation skips. So this guide takes it in order: what the pass actually is, how it differs from the vCard your new contact ends up saving, how to add one to your iPhone, what the handshake looks like in practice, what the Google Wallet half of the story is, what to demand from a platform that generates these passes, and where the honest limits are.

“NFC tag detected” means your phone’s NFC reader found a chip within about two centimeters of it and could not work out which app should open it — so it asked you instead. Nothing was installed, nothing was charged to you, and nothing is read or shared unless you tap the notification. The chip is passive: no battery, no GPS, no connection of its own.

If you came only for the off switch: on Android it is Settings → Connected devices → Connection preferences → NFC, toggled off. iPhone has no NFC toggle, but it does let you silence the alert — swipe left on the notification, tap Options, then Mute or Turn Off. Full steps for both, with Apple’s own wording, are further down.

To find your LinkedIn QR code, open the LinkedIn mobile app, tap the QR code icon in the search bar at the top of your home screen, and open the “My code” tab. From there iOS can “Share my code” or “Save to photos”, and Android can “SAVE TO GALLERY” — LinkedIn lists sharing itself as coming soon on Android. The code points at your LinkedIn profile and nothing else: it carries no phone number, no email and no booking link, it brings nothing back from the person who scans it, and LinkedIn may ask a signed-out visitor to log in before showing your full profile.

That code is a shortcut into the largest professional network on earth — LinkedIn puts its community at 1.3 billion members, over 290 million of them in North America. LinkedIn’s mobile interface changes, though, and guides to it go stale quietly. Every label below was checked against LinkedIn’s own help documentation on August 14, 2026.

A vCard is the standard file format for an electronic contact card. It is saved with a .vcf extension, travels as plain text under the MIME type text/vcard, and holds one person’s name, phone numbers, email addresses, employer, job title, postal address, website, and optionally a photo — every line wrapped between BEGIN:VCARD and END:VCARD. Because every phone, mail client, and CRM on the market can read one, a .vcf is what almost every “save to contacts” button actually hands over, including the one behind a QR-code business card.

This guide is about that file — not the trading card game that shares the name. What is inside a .vcf, how the three living versions of the format differ, why a contact sometimes arrives without the photo or the job title, and what a QR code can and cannot carry.