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Ten years ago today, I had the idea for an app I thought was interesting
- haser_au 8y agoGreat story. I still think the sharing of photos with collocated friends needs solving, or have I missed a Google photos feature release?
- mgkimsal 8y agoThis isn't a technically hard problem to solve, but it seems people have been chasing it for years without any strong uptake. I suspect this is something that will have to be 'built-in' to the OS, and ideally some cross-platform protocol compatibility, before it ever becomes a 'standard' (assuming it does). I worked with a startup for a while on a couple variations of this problem, and it's very much a classic chicken and egg problem. The angle that I was a bit more intrigued with taking was not about 'friends', and more just about the geo part. In other words, having your pics be available publicly by geo info. This conflicted a lot with the use cases of "share party pics with family/friends", but it seems there's dozens of ways to do that (facebook has a whole separate dedicated app that, to this day, few people I know knows about, but they all use facebook).
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- notatoad 8y agoI'm not an apple user, but isn't this essentially solved by airdrop? Or do people not actually use that?
- uptown 8y agoI use it regularly.
- woogiewonka 8y agoMe too.
- ndnxhs 8y agoAirdrop is pretty much useless because its proprietary and only works on apple devices. A useful tool for photo sharing has to work for almost everyone.
- WoodenChair 8y agoSomething is not "useless" because it is only "useful" to a portion of the population. Floppy disks were a useful tool for file sharing in the 1990s, but not amongst people who didn't own computers.
- grey-area 8y agoI think you're missing an 'I' or 'for me' in there somewhere. Lots of people find airdrop useful.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoLet's try to rescue this statement. Airdrop is useful in general, but there are still large pockets of people for whom it's useless. Large, like don't know, Europe. Airdrop is the kind of tool that follows Metcalfe's law (with "network" being "people who can Airdrop to each other"). In places where Android is the dominant market player, you'll have little luck trying to use Airdrop to exchange data with other people. This is not dissing Airdrop, just calling out that there's a huge market segment that still has this problem.
- jakobegger 8y agoAirdrop is incredibly unreliable. In my experience, you have a 50% chance that the other device will appear. If it works today, there's no guarantee it'll work tomorrow. And that's with all devices on the same Wifi network, in the same room. I don't know why it works so poorly.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 8y agoWhen I get done with an outing, Photos prompts me to share pictures of it with other people who were there and are pictured. So maybe it is being solved?
- mgkimsal 8y agowould be far more useful to share with anyone else who was there, regardless of if they're pictured (and, I have to presume, the app can determine via facial recognition who they are and if they're in your contact list). all your pics would go to others, and all the pics from others would go to you. (think concerts/events)
- asdfasgasdgasdg 8y agoUseful, maybe, but risky from a privacy perspective.
- chrisweekly 8y agoSee also https://photobutler.com https://photobutler.com
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- samspenc 8y agoSo, did the team (formerly) at Bump give us Google Photos? If so, kudos to them, it's one of the best Google apps I've used recently :)
- webspiderus 8y agosome of that team helped build the Google Photos app, but Google Photos was a product in its own right even before Bump joined the company and they were part of a (much) larger effort, of course.
- notatoad 8y agoHuh. I always thought bump had turned into the Android feature called "nearby". Had no idea Google photos was what came out of the bump acquisition.
- jpeg_hero 8y agoSeems like the graveyard of a lot of those '06 - '08 dreams. Imagine all the things we can do with these new iphones, and so cheaply too! -> no that world didn't happen -> working for the BIG 4.
- Apocryphon 8y ago> They ran an experiment. None of their lives have been ruined.” He knew they’d get good jobs, even if it meant the life of a project manager at Yahoo. “And none of their investors’ lives have been ruined either. When they close up shop, their investors will say, ‘That’s one more off the books. I don’t need to help them anymore. I get my time back.’” [...] “Let me tell you what the worst thing would be. The worst thing is that these guys get their funding tomorrow and are stuck doing this for another year. So far, they only lost one.” [...] All the while, Martino’s ultimate warning—that they might someday regret actually getting the money they wanted—would still hang over these two young men, inherent to a system designed to turn strivers into subcontractors. Instead of what you want to build—the consumer-facing, world-remaking thing—almost invariably you are pushed to build a small piece of technology that somebody with a lot of money wants built cheaply. As the engineer and writer Alex Payne put it, these startups represent “the field offices of a large distributed workforce assembled by venture capitalists and their associate institutions,” doing low-overhead, low-risk R&D for five corporate giants. In such a system, the real disillusionment isn’t the discovery that you’re unlikely to become a billionaire; it’s the realization that your feeling of autonomy is a fantasy, and that the vast majority of you have been set up to fail by design. No Exit: Struggling to Survive a Modern Gold Rush by Gideon Lewis-Kraus https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7643902 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7643902
- baxtr 8y agoSome thoughts: - I agree with the notion but I don’t think it’s only because it’s cheap. It’s also about speed. Some projects take ages at large companies no matter how much you throw at them - that’s the reason they havin PMF before you get funding is key. Show the models works and then get money for scaling the business - I imagine getting VC money for a moonshot is great though when you don’t need to get rich anymore. See Musk
- Vekz 8y agohuh, I was just wondering what happened to bump the other day when I was asked for a business card and contact info. Had no idea this is how the story played out.
- xrd 8y agoI thought Google+ led to Google Photos. That wasn't in this story. Everyone is claiming credit for Google Photos it seems!
- webspiderus 8y agoreally, Picasa led to Google Photos as the previous photo product the company had ..
- nostrademons 8y agoSurprised the parent's downvoted - it's as close to the truth as anything else. Like a lot of Google products, Photos has a lot of forebears. Picasa was one of them, as was Google+ (IIRC, the Picasa team was folded into Google+ when Larry refocused the company on Social in 2011). Sounds like Bump was also aquihired into it, and I think there was also a lot of cross-pollination between Image Search, Research, and Google Photos around some of the search & content recognition features.
- marban 8y agoAnd Picasa itself was originally created by Idealab. [I'm an EIR there]
- woah 8y agoWhat's so special about Google photos? As far as I can tell it just gets used because it is the default camera roll on Android.
- xrd 8y agoIt's the best app from the last few years. It's radically simple: snap a photo and (by default) it only gets uploaded when you are on WiFi. Later, you'll get a notification that it used AI to find the best pictures of the dozens you took and and assembled a photo album with them. You'll get notifications telling you that you had an important event a year ago and can see the most relevant photo from that day. It creates then and now photos, so I can see how my kids have changed from exactly a year or exactly five years ago. It automatically shares my photos of the kids with my wife. All this happens without any interaction other than snapping photos freely. For a busy parent, this can't be understated. Compared to Facebook, I don't have to put up with the noise. And, it only shares with a very limited set of people. Of course "it" does now know my kids'names. It's pretty amazing and scary to see how it knows my infant daughter's face is the same one as she has four years later. I'm not sure I would see the similarly if she weren't my own. Lightweight interactions with powerful AI and massive processing power behind it makes for an incredible app. The reviews are not lying.
- scarface74 8y ago“I might find an iPhone veteran...”. This was an email chain in October 2008? The iPhone had only been out for a little over a year, the official SDK for 8 months, and the store for 3 months.
- fenwick67 8y agoClassic hiring move
- blunte 8y agoIt drives me nuts. To be fair, usually it's a non-technical hiring manager who just doesn't know current/recent tech history, and they probably assume they can get higher quality by requiring more experience. For me as the potential candidate, it usually turns me off enough that I don't even bother contacting them.
- realusername 8y agoI remember the same with Android, I saw job offers asking for 5 years Android experience whereas Android itself was still maybe 3 years old at the time.
- invalidusernam3 8y agoI've seen a few of those type of ads. I've heard people say it's for H-1B visa jobs, where the position has to be advertised locally (in the US) first and if they can't find the correct candidate then they can hire internationally.
- jakobegger 8y agoMaybe he was speaking of one of the guys that reverse engineered iPhoneOS and who managed to write iPhone apps before the SDK was released?
- pavlov 8y agoThere were people around who had been writing Cocoa apps for years, some with 15+ years of experience going back to NeXT. The iPhone SDK was very simple to pick up with that background because it was basically a simplified AppKit where you get a single tiny window instance.
- justboxing 8y agoI remember Bump from their early days 2009 / 2010, they were demo-ing at either SFBeta or SFNewTech (don't remember which, I used to work with the organizers of both events back then). It was pitched as a Business Card / Contact info exchange app back then and I do remember getting a demo of it where 2 guys bumped their phones to exchange professional contact info. I thought it was funny, didn't think I'd use it. Interesting how their story played out. Looks like the Google acquisition was more of an acqui-hire and less for IP... EDIT 1: Found a demo video from 2011 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUOpFuOP6_k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUOpFuOP6_k EDIT 2: Another video from the founder in 2010. https://youtu.be/2Ir2bg253ag?t=7 https://youtu.be/2Ir2bg253ag?t=7
- jakobegger 8y agoAnd 10 years later, sharing stuff with people nearby still kinda sucks. 1. Instant Messaging Apps work for photos and contacts, but it's stupid that you need to transfer things via cloud (makes everything hellish slow when the network isn't fast) 2. Airdrop works only between Apple Devices, and when the stars are aligned just right. Other devices might appear, or they might not. If it works, it's fast. 3. USB drives are still the easiest way to share anything between computers. (SMB / AFS / NFS / SCP / rsync are all annoying to set up and always seem to fail for hard to debug reasons) I think the opportunity for something like Bump is still there, but it seems that most people just don't care enough about the inconvenience....
- snaily 8y agoI wish Android Beam had been pushed harder - it was an OS-level solution, and I understood it as playing really well with the Intent-centric API on Android, which meant basic functionality was essentially "free" to implement.
- jondubois 8y agoBump was such a silly idea. It's a miracle that they were able to get so many users. It's one of those ideas that sounds good at first glance but after thinking about it for a couple of minutes, you understand that it's actually a very bad idea. Maybe it picked up because of all the YC hype. I don't see how the act of physically bumping phones together to share content adds any value at all. It's disturbing that the founder would then go on and write an article about the whole experience. This represents everything that's wrong with startup accelerators.
- mattmanser 8y agoIt took off because back then having an iPhone was an exclusive thing and Apple promoted it in one of their early app commercials. Being able to 'bump' was a mark of status and one which had a special "handshake". Not sure why you're picking on the accelerators.
- jondubois 8y ago
- TeMPOraL 8y agoI miss Bump. It was pretty useful. Since Google acquihired them, I just wonder, why not build that feature into Android?
- jmfayard 8y agoIt is! It's called Android beam. Not super discoverable though
- Shywim 8y agoAndroid Beam is built-in since 8 years, but like many Android features, there's little to no discoverability when using the OS past the initial marketing on release. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_Beam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_Beam
- quickpost 8y agoFantastic story of all sorts of serendipitous collisions - thanks for sharing!
- Quanttek 8y agoTwitter pictures on threadreaderapp.com don't load with Firefox's tracking protection enabled
- kabes 8y agoHow did bump actually work without NFC?
- bsaul 8y agoread something about it a long time ago, so fwir : the accelerometer gives you a motion angle of the « bump », and finding the symmetrical motion in a given time window gives you the other phone involved in the bump.
- jakobegger 8y agoI don't think the "angle" of the bump played into it, since accelerometers only give you relative angles, not absolute values. And the compass isn't precise enough.
- bsaul 8y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20111219235527/http://bu.mp/faq https://web.archive.org/web/20111219235527/http://bu.mp/faq
- megablast 8y agoIt detected you bump your phone, sent your GPS location to a server, then looked for someone else who bumped their phone in the same location at the same time.
- jakobegger 8y agoBoth phones send a precise timestamp of the "bump" to the server. The server finds bumps that happen at the same time, and "connects" the phones. If multiple bumps happen at the same time, the server would probably use approximate geolocation or something like that additionally, but the better the resolution of the time stamp, the lower the probability of collisions between bumps.
- Jagat 8y ago"precise timestamps" from two phones is a hard distributed systems problem. If timestamp and geo were the only things that the app used, I wonder if it worked well only because there weren't too many people 'bumping' at the same time from that geo.
- mojuba 8y ago> Lesson: You can achieve a lot with just a few people and a little money ... if your rent/insurance etc. is magically paid for you by a fairy for the whole duration of your startup's early stage. Easy! If you don't get the lesson, read it again: You can achieve a lot with just a few people and a little money. People seem to dismiss this factor too easily and assume that anyone can become an entrepreneur the moment they decide to become an entrepreneur. No, it's not that easy for the majority of people.
- jondubois 8y agoThe whole article sounds insane from my perspective. If Google keeps acqui-hiring these kinds of people, it's going to turn into a mad house eventually. No wonder Google is starting to have issues about being out-of-touch now.
- iamgopal 8y agoI think major hurdles of being enterprenuer is achieving strong resilience to external changing factors. Problems will keep coming at every stage, a good one should expect and/or anticipate it and should not get tired by it. Not everyone's cup of tea. Some people are happy with good times and noodle salad.
- thosakwe 8y agoNot to mention, $16k in VC funding (or out-of-pocket) is not a “little money” for everyone out there.
- icebraining 8y ago$16k for five people, so $3.2k/person. Doesn't seem like a lot when it comes with the restriction of living in the Bay Area.
- ap3 8y agoShould someone’s story apply to everyone out there?
- jakobegger 8y ago
- k33n 8y agoBump was always pretty much a joke. It's amazing that these guys saw decent success without really contributing anything of value to anyone. Also, how do you work so hard you collapse when you really aren't doing anything?
- romed 8y agoSuccess without achievement is the whole story of YC. Everybody worships Sam Altman, who cashed out a worthless app/site/service. PG's big claim to fame is having sold something of no enduring value whatsoever to Yahoo! (same as Mark Cuban, FWIW).
- holografix 8y agoPassed out at the office from pushing too hard... took a weekend off. I could never find that kind of drive to pursue a commercial endeavour. Cure cancer? Maybe. Build a cute app? No thanks
- ovi256 8y agoI think it's valuable to look at his BATNA (alternative strategy). He was never going to work in a biochem wetlab to cure cancer. I feel safe saying he would have gone into investment banking or management consulting, prestigious jobs with high pay. Where people also regularly pass out from working long hours and don't take holidays.
- steelframe 8y agoBATNA stands for "Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement," which applies specifically to situations where you are in multi-party negotiations. The term doesn't generalize to "alternative strategy." I think maybe the term you were looking for was "opportunity cost."
- ovi256 8y agoIt's helpful to see a thing like career choice like the market participation that it is, and see market participants, in a sort of game theory view, as participants in an ongoing implicit negotiation.
- mariedm 8y agoDup: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18207194 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18207194
- ratsimihah 8y agoI've never seen so many people so happy getting thrown off the ground by a shockwave from a CEO hitting the ground.
- freen 8y agoWhy isn't Bump built into android?