[hack_edu]

I'm really curious what Bump brings to the table, at all, let alone what makes them worth the same breath as the rest of these companies.

It feels more like a trivial app put together on a hack weekend or Man Month than actual innovation.

[pg]

Have you used it?

[daeken]

That's a pretty poor response to a valid question. While the tone of the question was harsher than I think was warranted, the question of "why is this something I should care about?" is something that should be at the forefront of every product developer and investor's mind.

[pg]

Not at all. Surely the obvious first step in talking to someone about an app is to figure out how much they already know about it.

[cperciva]

While you may have intended your question as a question, that's not the impression it gave. My first reading of it was as a rudely sarcastic dismissal -- "obviously you don't know what you're talking about" -- and I was about to downvote it on grounds of incivility until I noticed that you were the author and realized that was probably not how you intended it to be read.

[rooshdi]

He was just asking an honest question and wanted to know if the person actually used it, since that would probably provide a deeper explanation of the utility of Bump than any personal opinion of his would. Let's not get too uptight around here people.

[cperciva]

I know what he meant. My point was that what he meant isn't what it sounded like at first glance (yay mixed metaphors!) and that's probably why daeken responded as he did.

[ecuzzillo]

I suspect that that is only the default interpretation because the site has gone so far downhill and there are so many nasty stupid comments.

[hack_edu]

I have. Polish is polish, the utility it provides feels pretty minor.

[pg]

Utility is number of users times how much it helps each one. This is the sort of app that helps a very large number of people, but only briefly each time. It's sort of like Google in that respect. I'm not sure how many users Bump has, because this is one of those companies like Dropbox that grows so fast that the last number I heard is always way off, but many millions. They may have more users than anyone else we've funded.

They're also like Google in that most of the hard work is behind the scenes, which tends to affect users' perception of how much the app is doing. To an inexperienced programmer it might seem like it wouldn't be hard to build a search engine-- and in fact it isn't hard to write a crawler and build an index. What makes it hard to build the actual Google is (a) the scale on which they operate and (b) the refinements they employ beyond merely searching an index. It's basically the same with Bump. They have to operate on a large scale, and to work reliably they have to deal with all sorts of weird edge cases.

[daeken]

I don't think this really answers the question of what Bump brings to the table, though. There's no doubt in my mind that Bump is growing like crazy, or that they're doing really hard work to make that happen and provide a good product, but... none of this matters to me as a user. What I care about is what Bump gives me that other products/services don't. What is that?

[pg]

Oy. The reason I didn't explain what Bump does is precisely the question you thought it was improper to ask him: since he's a Bump user, he already knows.

What Bump does is mutually authenticate two smartphone users by having them bump their phones together, and correlating the accelerometer readings. On top of authentication you can build all sorts of things, starting with exchanging contact info. The hard/critical part is reliability.

[daeken]

Sorry, I think we're talking past each other here. I understand what Bump does/is, but what I (and I believe the original asker) are missing is where the value is. While I can come up with a million use cases for this, e.g. bumping for payments, bumping to share photos, etc, I believe you're in a fairly unique position to be able to express what the core value proposition of the company -- now and moving forward -- is and why it matters to the users. I don't think focusing on the how or what does that.

[mnemonicsloth]

The bump makes transactions physical, solves the I-think-I-voted problem (which gets worse with 2 people, and much worse with money).

Just a guess. I haven't used it.

[YuriNiyazov]

it is a clean interface to transfer data to a nearby device.