What is the best way to swap contacts at a conference?

Show a QR code on your phone. The other person points their normal camera at it and your details open in their browser. It is faster than spelling out an email address in a loud room, and there is nothing for either of you to install.

How do I remember who I met at a conference?

Capture the place, not just the name. Ahoyy records where you were when you saved each contact, so the person comes back as a scene rather than a row in a list. Adding one line of your own the same day makes it stick.

Do I still need paper business cards at a conference?

You do not need to hand any out, since a QR code does the same job and can be corrected later. You will still be given paper by other people, which is why scanning matters as much as sharing.

Does card scanning work with no signal in the venue?

Yes. The text recognition runs on your phone, so scanning a card works in a basement hall with no bars. Opening someone else’s card page needs a connection.

Will my phonebook fill up with conference contacts?

No. Contacts saved in Ahoyy stay in Ahoyy, separate from your phone contacts. You keep the people without wrecking your address book.

Can my whole team see the contacts I collected?

No. Ahoyy has no shared team lead pool and no dashboard showing who collected which contact. Your saved contacts are yours. If a team view is what you are shopping for, Popl and Blinq sell that.

How much does it cost?

Your card, the QR code, scanning and saving contacts are free. There is no per-event fee and no card details needed to start.

a.Ahoyy

Events

Forty conversations in two days. Four you can still place.

A conference is a compression machine. You talk to more people in two days than you normally would in two months, and every one of those conversations gets thirty seconds of your attention before the next session starts. The problem is never meeting people. The problem is Thursday, when you sit down to follow up and the names have come loose from the faces.

Ahoyy is built for that Thursday. It is free, your card opens in any phone camera without the other person installing anything, and every contact you save carries the place you met them.

Create my card free All event guides

A saved contact in Ahoyy showing the name, company and the place where they were met

Why conference contacts go cold

The failure is not laziness. It is that the useful part of a conference conversation lives in your short-term memory and nothing writes it down.

• You swap details in a corridor between sessions and neither of you types a note.
• Everyone you meet works in the same industry, so job titles all blur into each other by day two.
• The card you were given has a company logo and a mobile number, and nothing about why you liked them.
• You get home, your inbox has three hundred emails in it, and the follow-up slips to next week and then to never.

The detail people actually remember

Ask someone about a person they met at a conference and they rarely start with the name. They start with the place. The queue for the good coffee. The bar on the first night. The workshop where the projector broke.

Ahoyy records that for you. When you save a contact, the app notes where you were, and you can pin the exact spot by searching for the venue. The contact then reads like a memory instead of a database row: this is the woman from the Hall 2 coffee stand who runs data ops at a logistics firm.

Add one line of your own on top of it, the thing you said you would send them, and your follow-up writes itself.

Conference contacts shown as pins on a map of where each person was met

Handling the cards you are handed

Plenty of people at conferences still carry paper, especially outside tech. You do not need to convert them. Take the card, then scan it with your phone camera and the name, number and company save straight into Ahoyy.

Card reading runs on your device, so it works in a basement exhibition hall with no signal. The contacts go into Ahoyy, not into your personal phonebook, which means your phone does not end up with three hundred half-remembered names in it.

A two-day routine that works

1. Before you travel, make your card and put your role on it, not just your name. A stranger needs to know what you do.
2. Save your QR code as an image in your phone photos. Venue wifi will fail at least once.
3. On the floor, show the QR code rather than describing your website. Their camera does the rest.
4. When someone gives you paper, scan it there and then. Ten seconds, while you still know who they were.
5. At the end of each day, open your contact list and add one line to each new person. The place is already saved, so you only have to add the why.
6. On the train home, send the messages. You are following up while the event is still in their head too.

What this page is not selling you

If you are attending a conference as a sales team with a lead target, Ahoyy is the wrong tool and we would rather say so on the way in.

• We do not scan event badges. That data belongs to the organiser and needs their lead retrieval licence.
• We have no CRM sync, so nothing lands in Salesforce or HubSpot by itself.
• We have no lead capture mode, no qualifying questions and no team reporting on who collected what.
• For those, read our honest comparisons with Popl and Blinq. Both are built for exactly that job.

Common questions

What is the best way to swap contacts at a conference?: Show a QR code on your phone. The other person points their normal camera at it and your details open in their browser. It is faster than spelling out an email address in a loud room, and there is nothing for either of you to install.
How do I remember who I met at a conference?: Capture the place, not just the name. Ahoyy records where you were when you saved each contact, so the person comes back as a scene rather than a row in a list. Adding one line of your own the same day makes it stick.
Do I still need paper business cards at a conference?: You do not need to hand any out, since a QR code does the same job and can be corrected later. You will still be given paper by other people, which is why scanning matters as much as sharing.
Does card scanning work with no signal in the venue?: Yes. The text recognition runs on your phone, so scanning a card works in a basement hall with no bars. Opening someone else’s card page needs a connection.
Will my phonebook fill up with conference contacts?: No. Contacts saved in Ahoyy stay in Ahoyy, separate from your phone contacts. You keep the people without wrecking your address book.
Can my whole team see the contacts I collected?: No. Ahoyy has no shared team lead pool and no dashboard showing who collected which contact. Your saved contacts are yours. If a team view is what you are shopping for, Popl and Blinq sell that.
How much does it cost?: Your card, the QR code, scanning and saving contacts are free. There is no per-event fee and no card details needed to start.

Get your card ready before the next conference

One minute now saves you a pile of unreadable cards later.

Create my card free