Reference
The contact-capture and networking glossary
The people-you-meet category has its own vocabulary, and a lot of it is left undefined on the way to a pricing page. Here is the plain-language version: what each term means, and where it actually matters when you are deciding how to keep track of the people you meet.
Badge scanning
Reading the QR code or barcode on a conference attendee badge to capture their details, instead of, or alongside, scanning a paper card. Common in sales-team tools built for trade-show floors.
CardDAV
The open standard that syncs contacts across devices and services. It is the plumbing behind your address book staying the same on your phone and laptop. Apps that store contacts in your iCloud ride on this rather than on a private company server.
Context capture
Saving what you discussed, and where you met, alongside the contact, at the moment of meeting. It is the difference between a name and a relationship: a name is forgettable, a name plus the specific thing you talked about is durable. This is the part most scanners skip.
CRM (customer relationship management)
Software for managing a company's pipeline of customers and prospects, like Salesforce or HubSpot. Built for teams and sales processes. Powerful, and usually more than an individual who just wants to remember the people they meet actually needs.
Data enrichment
Automatically filling in extra details about a contact by gathering them from sources across the web. It can be convenient, and it is also the feature most associated with privacy exposure and breaches in this category, because enriching your network means a server is collecting and storing it.
Follow-up window (the 72 hours)
The roughly three-day period after meeting someone in which you both still remember the specifics of the conversation. A follow-up sent inside it, referencing something you actually discussed, lands; one sent after it tends to read as generic, because the detail that made it personal has faded on both sides.
Forgetting curve / the memory cliff
The well-documented pattern that memory of new information drops sharply in the first days and then levels off. After a conference, it is why you can name four of the forty people you met by Friday. Capturing a detail in the moment is what fights it.
Keep-in-touch cadence
A chosen interval, weekly, monthly, quarterly, at which an app reminds you to reconnect with a contact, so relationships do not quietly lapse. The signature feature of personal CRMs, and increasingly of capture apps that want to own the whole loop.
Lead capture
Recording a prospect's details at an event to feed a sales process, usually by scanning a card or badge and routing it into a CRM. Capture is the front door of a pipeline. It is not the same as following up, which still has to be done by a person.
OCR (optical character recognition)
The technology that reads the text off a photographed business card and turns it into editable fields, name, title, company, email, phone. Quality varies; busy or multilingual cards are where scanners differ most. On Apple devices, this is handled by the built-in Vision framework.
On-device processing
Doing the work, scanning, recognition, storage, on your phone rather than sending it to a company server. It is a privacy posture: data that never leaves your device cannot be leaked from a database that does not hold it.
Personal CRM (PRM)
A tool for managing your own relationships rather than a company's customers: who you know, your history together, and when to reach back out. The individual's answer to "I meet too many people to keep track of them in my head."
Touchpoint
A single interaction with a contact, a meeting, a message, a call. Relationships are built from a sequence of them, and most die from a missed second touchpoint, not a missed first.
vCard
The standard file format (.vcf) for sharing contact information between apps and address books. If an app lets you export contacts as vCards or CSV, your data is portable and yours to take with you.
Warm introduction
Being introduced to someone new by a person you both trust, rather than reaching out cold. Far more likely to get a reply. Remembering who can introduce you to whom is one of the quiet payoffs of keeping good context on the people you meet.
Put the vocabulary to work.
Met captures the card, keeps the context, and drafts the follow-up, then reminds you before the window closes. Your contacts stay in your iCloud, never on our servers. Free to start.
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