Ina Fried

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Bump Aims to Ease Sharing Files Between Phones and PCs

Bump, the program best known for letting people share photos and contacts from one phone to another, is expanding further onto the desktop.

With a new software update, photos, contacts and other types of files can now be shared between phones and computers (both Mac and Windows). Bump tiptoed onto the PC nine months ago by allowing phones to bump photos to their computer.

“No one ever says ‘I sure look forward to syncing my phone with my computer!'” Bump said in a blog post. “We want to change that. Because really, it’s the year 2013 — we have self-driving cars, private space exploration, 3D printers — but most folks have a hard time getting a video taken on their phone over to their laptop.”

Bump has been downloaded more than 125 million times, but is still missing advertising or anything else that might generate revenue for the company.

“We’re still not focused on monetization,” CEO Dave Lieb said in an interview.

That said, the PC feature, as well as a companion cloud-sync service, could help change that down the road. With the latest update, users can store files in the cloud, a sort of virtual USB stick. For now, Bump is limiting the size of any one file to 30 megabytes, but offering an unlimited number of files.

Over time, this could migrate into a paid premium service of some sort.

“We are going to measure and see [if there are] a lot of people that want to do much bigger files,” Lieb said.

On the phone side, Lieb said, Bump remains focused on iOS and Android, though he is keeping his eye on BlackBerry and Windows Phone.

“We’re in the wait-and-see camp,” Lieb said. “A year ago, when we asked that question, I was thinking ‘absolutely not’ when I said ‘wait and see.’ Now it is a more honest ‘wait and see.’ There are a lot of interesting things happening.”

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