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Bump (YC S09) has been acquired by Google
- alexfringes 13y agoAnother step towards NFC being skipped as a truly impactful technology?
- yid 13y agoHow is it being skipped? As an example, parking meters in San Francisco are almost all NFC-equipped. Google's flagship phones have all been NFC-enabled. The future looks bright for NFC...
- selectodude 13y agoI don't see mobile wallets going too far until Apple gets on board. And that's a big if at this point, seeing as there won't be any NFC on Apple devices for at least another year.
- mcintyre1994 13y agoI think a barrier at least equally as large in some places will be that it's only really on flagships - if it needs to be used by the masses getting it into every Android smartphone instead of a select few would be a huge step forward. In many places that would probably be more significant than Apple implementing it (although not North America, which is at a guess disproportionately significant for development effort etc)
- trimbo 13y agoI have a Nexus 4 and live in SF. The NFC feature on the meters almost never works. Probably 10% of the time. I have to enter the meter ID most of the time. The biggest problem with NFC, etc... it's still significantly faster to swipe a credit card! Getting my phone out, unlocking it with a code, making sure the screen stays on while I stand in line (for e.g. Starbucks). This future is for the birds.
- pdog 13y agoThe future is NFC-enabled smartwatches.
- consultant23522 13y agoI've had similar experience. I have a Galaxy Nexus and had a terrible time getting the NFC stuff to work. My friends and I stood around looking like idiots for a good 10-15 minutes trying to get basic stuff like sending contacts or files to each other. Getting a good connection was nearly impossible. Maybe it's gotten better, but boy was it terrible when I tried it.
- VLM 13y agoJust take a picture of a QR code and be done with it. Works great. What kind of hardware is more prevalent, graphical displays and cameras, or NFC hardware? Anything you can do with NFC you can do easier (easier, not easily...) with QR codes. NFC hardware is slightly more vandalism resistant than displays and cams. But bulletproof displays and cams are pretty tough, and if you're going to have to put up a cam to protect the NFC hardware, may as well go all QR code.
- jcampbell1 13y agoIf you want NFC, the easiest way to get it is to look in your wallet for a Master Card. Call the phone number on the Master Card, ask for a PayPass. I stick the paypass to the inside of my wallet. It works 100% of the time, with no unlocking or launching an app. I don't open my wallet, just put it close to the machine, and it works without issue.
- unsignedint 13y agoThe problem of PayPass, though, is that some stores just don't bother maintaining their PayPass reader so it works. Half a time, it either doesn't work, or I've seen cases a store person not knowing how to interpret the fact that payment was accepted or not. Rather than going through this, it's just easier to just take out the card and use that instead. Another thing about those NFC methods, considering they are relatively new technology, is that they are not seeing something tangible and it apparently makes a store person bit nervous when it doesn't work. I often observed signs of hostility, perhaps, they feel like I'm trying to do something nasty, because they just don't know what that's all about.
- brk 13y agoLet's be realistic, all the signs of this point to "acquihire". The statement on their page doesn't give a real convincing feeling that Google bought them in order to make this concept a ubiquitous part of Android or anything like that. Bump is/was "neat". I downloaded the app the instant I heard about it, 4 years ago? In all that time I never "bumped" with another person. I exchange about 700 business cards per year. For the first 18 months, and then a couple of random times later, I'd ask people "do you have Bump?", met with nothing but odd stares. NOBODY every asked me or suggested we us an app to exchange contact info. I love the idea, but it just doesn't seem to have taken off. Not to mention that (IMO) this was a little more of a "feature" than a "product". Don't get me wrong, they built something cool, gots lots of users and presumably lots of active users, and managed to get acquired by Google. I have tons of respect for the team, but I don't think you can draw any conclusions from this acquisition as it relates to NFC or anything else.
- xerophtye 13y agoaha! so YOU are the culprit! the reason NFC is at the top of the page even though it is no way related to bump! You got a lot of us confused btw
- andrewljohnson 13y ago4 years of hard work and novel thinking, followed by acquisition. I don't know the Bump team, but I respect the effort and the outcome.
- Timothee 13y agoEven though I hadn't thought about this company for a long time, just yesterday evening I was wondering "whatever happened to Bump?" and checked their site. Since the start they've had interesting technology (though of the kind that looks easier to implement than it really is) but, in my opinion at least, never found a killer app for it. I remember when they had that webpage where you would hit the space bar with your phone and that would be enough to create the connection. That was really cool, but it felt like a "cool trick" rather than something I ended up using. edit: I didn't want to come off as negative and I'm sorry if it reads this way. Their solutions are very innovative and inventive, and really feel magical. I just wish it had caught on more… Hopefully Google is planning on using the technology in many places. It would make sense of course for it to be part of the core of Android, but the syncing between mobile and desktop could be very useful as well.
- jasonlotito 13y agoSo, this leaves everyone who was building something on top of Bump in a very odd position. Do we continue building on Bump, or do we work to implement something else on our own. Please note, I'm not saying they are wrong for being acquired by Google. Just saying that as of right now, building on the Bump platform just got a lot more unsure.
- gkoberger 13y agoFinally. Bump is cool, but this is one of those technologies that will only work if baked right in to the OS.
- hboon 13y agoThat could have been said for Dropbox too. There's pros and cons to each approach. If Bump was built into a single OS, it'd limit its interoperability.
- benologist 13y agoDropbox provides massive utility for laptops and desktops as well.
- Florin_Andrei 13y agoTo me, Dropbox is useful precisely because it works everywhere.
- reledi 13y agoDropbox is very useful even when not sharing data between people, Bump isn't for all I know (never actually used it).
- geuis 13y agoThere are reasons NFC isn't taking off. 1) It's a technology, not a feature. Many companies, mostly Android handset makers but also Blackberry and Nokia, have included it in their devices as "yet another selling point". It was included not as a way to make a better device or experience for customers, but as a gimmick for upselling handsets. 2) It's insecure. Holy hell, Batman. Just spend a couple minutes reading through the security section of the NFC Wikipedia entry. It's insanely easy to read transactions remotely, modify data, and jam signals. Even more, there is no hint of security built into the technology. None. No RF signal modification detection, no encryption. 3) Unreliable. While it sounds like a good idea on paper, for the most part it just doesn't work very well in practice. There's too many subpar implementations in too many devices. Just because you have a good one in your handset doesn't help when most of the limited ones available in public are cheap. There's a damn good reason Apple hasn't included NFC. It's broken. They definitely put out crappy products from time to time (don't forget Ping, iPod socks, Maps, Siri, MobileMe, and about 300 variations of the Mac before Jobs came back). But NFC hasn't proven to be something useful or valuable. They won't include it. Perhaps something like it in the future, but never NFC in its current form.
- mkolodny 13y agoThose all sound like great reasons for Google to buy a company who's been hacking on the problem successfully.
- kmfrk 13y agoAt this point, it's clear that Apple won't include NFC after declaring it dead at their iPhone keynote: http://gigaom.com/2013/09/10/with-ibeacon-apple-is-going-to-dump-on-nfc-and-embrace-the-internet-of-things/ http://gigaom.com/2013/09/10/with-ibeacon-apple-is-going-to-....
- bcoates 13y agoTech product messaging 101: Every technology you don't support is dead and useless, unless you're FUDding about how much better your vaporware version is than everyone else's actually existing product.
- 13y ago
- veritas20 13y agoWould have loved to see Bump pivot to an in-person transaction verification and facilitation app. Imagine having Bump as the intermediary of in-person transactions for large purchases coordinated over Craiglist sales.
- suyash 13y agoWhy is Google buying dead companies..Acq-hiring? I thought Bump was dead, it never worked when I was trying to network at events :(
- 100k 13y agoGood luck to the Bump team at Google!
- kmfrk 13y agoThe logo's a cute idea. Nice to see an acquisition statement with some heart instead of the boilerplate examples[1]. [1]: http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com
- JOnAgain 13y ago"... stay tuned for future updates" read, Google will likely be shutting down our services within the next 6 months.
- ok_craig 13y agoI agree, any service ever created should be forced to continue to run perpetually regardless value, user interest, or cost to the company running it.
- derefr 13y agoI think you're confusing an "is" statement for an "ought" statement. Google probably will be shutting Bump down. Is that a bad thing? The GP comment didn't say anything about that one way or another; just that it's probably going to happen, whether its defensible or not.
- Cherian_Abraham 13y agoGoogle acquires Bump. It's not the "bumping" that's valuable. It's figuring out two people are in proximity to each other that allows them to bump - that's Gold.
- ivankirigin 13y agoI still love Bump's Flock app, which uses that tech for photos. https://theflockapp.com/ https://theflockapp.com/
- baddox 13y agoIs that a very difficult problem? I thought they just grab the location from the phone, send it to their service, and their service looks for other bumps in the physical and temporal vicinity. It's a rather clever solution, but not exactly a technology that seems worth acquiring, unless there are some patents or tricky performance optimizations I'm missing.
- jamwt 13y agoCan't elaborate, but there's quite a bit more to it than that. The rabbit hole is pretty deep.
- baddox 13y agoCan anyone speculate? The only thing I'm coming up with is that it might require a geo index for quickly calculating the distances between a huge number of location pairs.
- Cherian_Abraham 13y agohttp://www.quora.com/Bump-Acquired-by-Google-2013/How-does-Bump-work http://www.quora.com/Bump-Acquired-by-Google-2013/How-does-B...
- 11185d 13y ago
- abbott 13y agoGoogle acquired an extremely talented team.
- mindotus 13y agoCongrats to the Bump team! Would be interesting to see where the future leads with Bump & Google and how it integrates into Android!
- jaredsohn 13y agoFor awhile, I've thought that the problem with Bump is that it requires that the other person shares the same app (although recently I discovered that you can ask the other person to browse to http://bu.mp http://bu.mp). So I have been working on the side on an HTML5 mobile solution that allows sharing contact information and messages with people nearby by just asking them to go to a URL. The site needs a big UI and workflow revamp (already worked out on paper) and won't scale right now (it just uses a single instance of Meteor and a MongoDB database and doesn't handle Internet-scale abuse.) You can see the current iteration at http://www.near.im/ http://www.near.im/.
- Rygu 13y agoI was trying it on my iMac and phone, opened the website on both devices, then it somewhat disappointed me (should have looked better) by asking to sign in with Facebook. A login-less demo would sell itself better.
- jaredsohn 13y agoThanks for checking it out. Yeah, the UI is ugly and overly complicated right now. It is really more of a technical demo and a project for me to experiment with Meteor on at this point (it has zero active users.) I am presently requiring a login to post to (in theory) prevent flooding it with spam. The person who is receiving the message does not need to log in. I have thought about removing the Facebook login requirement either for now (when there aren't many users) or permanently (need to have a way to prevent spam.)
- savrajsingh 13y agoCongrats Dave and team!
- kalid 13y agoAgreed, congrats Dave!
- slykat 13y agoI always thought bump would be a compelling technology if it was baked into an OS liked Android. The main issue was getting past the hurdle of convincing others to download it - no one wanted to download an app just to exchange contact info in a moment of need. If was already on your phone I could see users adopting it for things like contacts & photo exchange.
- radiusq 13y agoCan we all stop congratulating eachother for Aquihires? Clearly it wasn't the goal to build a company for 4 years only to see it for parts. Oh, because Google bought it then its pats-on-the-back all around. Sad what this industry is coming to.
- yapcguy 13y agoSo did Bump fail or is this considered a successful exit? I met some Bump folk a year ago. The company had a lot of employees and still wasn't making any money. They basically burnt all their investors money. Calling this an acquisition is bending the truth.
- nl 13y agoCalling this an acquisition is bending the truth. Umm. Google bought them - that's an acquisition no matter if they are making money or not (unless "acquisition" has been redefined somehow)
- eigenvector 13y agoThe announcement doesn't actually say that Google bought them. It just says that the Bump team is joining Google.
- yapcguy 13y agoI wish we could have more detail on these kind of transactions. Someone glancing at the headline would assume this was a successful exist for a YCombinator backed company. However, perhaps any remaining cash was returned to the original investors, less costs of liquidation, and any assets were "sold" to Google for $1 with some of the development team moving to Google as temporary contractors or probationary hires, rather than immediate permanent hires.
- mathattack 13y agoAcquisition or acquihire? It's tough to know without seeing the return to the original investors.
- yapcguy 13y agoI think this obfuscation comes from a fear of failure, which is ironic given that it's the ready acceptance of failure and the can-do attitude which is supposed to set American entrepreneurs apart from Europeans and others. It seems that investors are now scared of failing, losing money and the impact on reputation, so they want to preserve their mythical image as Titans of Silicon Valley (much like investment bankers believed they were Masters of the Universe) for as long as possible. Thus they come up with dubious acquisitions, acquihires and mask strategic failure as pivoting.
- wowaname 13y agoTen years from now: /.*/ has been acquired by Google.
- X4 13y agoWhat is Bump? Was that that business-card sharing app I remember from the past?