Bump Shares What Its 10 Million Users Share (Infographic)

Liz Gannes — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 17:40:57 +0000

The mobile app Bump may still be known to people in tech as what it started as — a way to exchange contact information between the owners of two phones by touching them — but it’s become a much more broadly used way to share content over the air.

In fact, Bump is the seventh most downloaded iOS app of all time in the U.S., and places third in Japan.

Having recently passed 50 million total downloads with 10 million active users, Bump Technologies just sent over an infographic that details the history and habits of Bumping. For instance, bumping activity pops at night and on weekend, and the single most active user bumped 480 times in the past month.

Bump CEO David Lieb told us that the most popular form of content shared on Bump now is photos, with 1 to 1.5 million shared per day, followed by apps, music and, finally, contacts.

Lieb said he ultimately wants Bump to stand for “anything you want to do in the real world using your phone” — think NFC, payments, et cetera.

Bump recently raised $16 million in Series B funding from investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital.

Bump Technologies Founders Talk About Platforms, APIs and Showing the iPhone and Android How to Get Along

Kara Swisher — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 20:18:27 +0000

Earlier this week, BoomTown motored down to Mountain View, Calif., to yet another cookie-cutter office park to visit what I consider one of the more interesting and innovative start-ups around Silicon Valley of late.

Bump Technologies has definitely gotten a lot of attention, mostly due to the gimmicky feel of the service, which allows users to swap a wide range of data–contacts, photos and soon, much more–when they tap two phones together.

There have been lots of versions of this kind of thing over the years, of course, using a variety of technologies. But the surge in smartphone popularity and app use has made digitally enabled physical transactions a whole lot easier.

These days, even competing operating systems, like those for the Apple (AAPL) iPhone and Google (GOOG) Android devices, can “bump” in a much nicer way than they are currently doing as companies.

Bump does more than just offer a cute way for hipsters to trade phone numbers. When thought of as a technology platform that can be used by a variety of players, Bump gets much more interesting.

In fact, the company just launched a new API for Android and the iPad this week, to allow developers to more easily implement Bump technology with their own apps.

Bump already had an existing iPhone API and big services, such as PayPal, have deployed it to allow users to bump payments to one other. Others are using Bump to move music from one mobile phone to another.

Some top investors certainly find it all promising, including Ram Shriram, Ron Conway and Sequoia Capital, who have added $3 million to Bump’s kitty since its start last year as a Y Combinator company founded by CEO David Lieb, Andy Huibers and Jake Mintz.

Here is an interview I did with Lieb and Mintz at Bump’s offices about where Bump is headed:

[ See post to watch video ]

A Desktop That Begs to Be Organized

Katherine Boehret — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 04:02:02 +0000

Like many people today, I keep a lot of my important documents and communications in digital form. But I still print out the files and put them on my desk so I can have them in front of me instead of buried in computer subfolders within folders.

This week, I tested BumpTop, a program that displays items in a way that makes programs and files easy to see and open. It does this by turning your digital desktop into a three-dimensional environment that looks like your physical desktop. A few quick gestures neatly stack piles of items or tack important items onto one of four virtual walls. You can even flick your mouse to “toss” files to programs or group files into a pile, like stacking all your PDF files together. Special photo frames on the walls show slideshows of photos from PC folders or feeds from photo Web sites like Flickr or Picasa.

[ See post to watch video ]

BumpTop comes from Toronto-based Bump Technologies Inc. and it has been in a private testing stage for a little over a year. Starting Wednesday, it’s available for anyone to download at BumpTop.com. It comes in a free or $29 Pro version. In Pro, files you use most often will grow bigger over time and you can flip through a pile’s contents by rolling the mouse’s scroll wheel, among other things.

I used BumpTop Pro for over two weeks and tried it on four computers running three different Windows operating systems: XP, Vista, and the prerelease version of Windows 7. BumpTop says it hopes to develop a Mac version in the future. (It should work on Parallels, a program that runs Windows virtually on a Mac, according to Bump Technologies, but not on Fusion, a similar program.)

Good-Looking Display

This program is a real looker. When I showed it to friends, they immediately wanted to play with it, dragging pictures to pin on virtual walls and drawing circles around several icons at once to stack them into piles like magic. And when you toss files to certain programs, they perform functions. A Microsoft Word document tossed to the email icon generates an email with the document attached. Photos I tossed to the Facebook icon were posted on the social-networking site. Files can be tossed to a printer, the recycle bin, other piles and, in the Pro version, attached USB drives.

Program Switch

But as much as I liked BumpTop, I kept coming back to the same conclusion: It was fun while I was using it, but I wasn’t naturally inclined to leave the program I was using — like my email program, my browser or TweetDeck — just to do something on the desktop in a more visually pleasing way. And since the computer’s desktop has never been as functional as popular programs, it’s hard to expect people to spend a lot of time there.

BumpTop creates a three-dimensional desktop where files can be cleverly organized or displayed.

Also, while BumpTop introduces a new, attractive user interface to the desktop, its 3-D functionality doesn’t extend throughout the whole computer, so you find yourself jumping back and forth between different ways of doing things.

BumpTop requires a computer with 3-D graphics and drivers, which older machines won’t have. Just for kicks I installed BumpTop on my older XP machine, which didn’t have the necessary requirements, and sure enough, it ran slowly and didn’t represent programs like Microsoft Outlook (MSFT) and Mozilla’s Firefox with the correct icons. Specific system requirements for BumpTop, along with a list of what the Pro version has that the free version lacks, can be found at BumpTop.com/download.

BumpTop’s point of view is like looking down from the ceiling in a room with four walls. It installs with three picture frames on its walls, and these display content from three sources: your computer’s My Pictures folder, Flickr.com’s main photo feed and a Flickr feed of photos Bump Technologies chose. You can change the images in settings, or delete the frames altogether.

The picture frames show ever-changing slideshows, and to do this, they only load low-resolution thumbnails of the images they display. This looks good when you’re quickly glancing at BumpTop, but if you double-click on a frame to zoom in, you’ll see a blurry photo. Bump Technologies says it plans to improve this where possible. Any photos on BumpTop other than those displayed in frames are visible in high resolution when you zoom in.

BumpTop loads with icons representing Twitter, Facebook and Email pinned to its right wall. And you can add your printer to the wall and toss things to it, printing them immediately.

Wall Clingers

The small visual details built into BumpTop make it a pleasure to use. Every time you open something, its representative icon hurls toward you in 3-D as if it were thrown. Items that are pinned to a wall flip end over end and playfully cling to the wall surface like a starfish with sticky, suction feet.

Special mouse movements generate on-screen options for organizing your BumpTop. Lassoing multiple images by drawing a line around them with your mouse pulls up a pie menu with options like “Grow,” “Shrink” and “Grid.” A “Pile by Type” option can organize all or just some of your desktop icons into piles arranged by similar characteristics, which by itself could be a big help.

Searching for something on your desktop isn’t a hassle anymore. Any time BumpTop is open, you can start typing and the program will search names of all items in BumpTop for results with the text you’re typing; those that match your request will glow.

I tried BumpTop on a touch-screen PC running Windows 7 — the HP TouchSmart PC — and the feeling of reaching out and tossing things around with my finger was even more enjoyable than using the mouse. As touch-screen PCs become more popular, BumpTop and programs like it will fit in more naturally.

If you miss seeing the photo that was on your regular desktop, an adjustment in Settings lets you use your Windows background on the BumpTop floor. Images can be assigned to each of the four walls; I assigned a photo of the National Mall at night to my back wall and a photo of my favorite lighthouse to my floor.

BumpTop is a pleasure to use and for no cost, the free version is certainly worth a try. If you like what you see and you’re willing to change the way you use your desktop, the Pro version might be worthwhile. Just be sure your computer has the correct specifications and be ready for blurry close-ups of the picture frames.

Edited By Walter S. Mossberg