Bump Photos to your Computer!

One of the reasons people love Bump is that it's the fastest and simplest way to share photos with friends and family.  Bumping photos has been the most popular way to use Bump -- tens of millions of people have already bumped more than 600 million photos in the last two years.

When we talk to people who use Bump, they often tell us how they love that Bump just makes sense to them.  If they want to share a photo with a friend or family member, they don't have to understand complicated technology -- they can just bump their phones together.  But one of their biggest complaints is that it is hard to get photos off their phone and onto their computer.  Syncing is complicated and often requires a cable you just can't find, and people are fed up with emailing their own photos to themselves.  Users would often jokingly tell us, "Bump is great; if only my computer could Bump too!"

So we built it.

Starting today, everyone who uses Bump can go to http://bu.mp on their computer web browser to bump photos from their phone directly to their computer.  There's no software to install -- it all runs in your browser.  You simply select the photos in the Bump app on your phone and then gently bump the spacebar on your keyboard... and voila!  Your photos will instantly appear on your computer.  It's how technology should work.

From there, you can save them to your hard drive or get a short link to share with friends on Facebook, Twitter, email, or IM (we host the photos for free, no limits).  Bump works with modern versions of most of the popular web browsers, including Safari, Chrome, and Firefox.

Watch the quick demo video, or better yet, go try it yourself at http://bu.mp.  

We hope you enjoy it!

-dave and the Bump Team

Photobump_forpress

 

Introducing Bump Pay, A New Project and App from Bump Labs

Our mission at Bump is to solve real problems that people have in their lives by making connections between people and between devices as simple and accessible as possible.  The Bump app is a great example of this.  We originally built it to solve an acute pain we were facing -- connecting devices to share contact information was painfully difficult -- and we wanted to make the solution as simple and intuitive as we could, by just bumping devices together.  Very quickly we saw how strongly this idea resonated with people.  Today, Bump is one of the most popular apps of all time, downloaded by more than 80 million people and used to share millions of contacts and photos each day.

We see many other problems in our daily lives that could be solved with the philosophy, technology, and design that yielded Bump.  We have an internal incubator we call Bump Labs, where we work on some of our latest ideas that could result in standalone products or eventually get woven into the core Bump app.  Some of these ideas originate in hackathons; others are threads we've been pursuing for some time.

Today we'd like to introduce a project from Bump Labs called Bump Pay.  Bump Pay is an app that lets you pay your friends by just bumping your iPhones or iPod touches together.  We spent a lot of time making the experience as simple as possible -- to use it, you just type in the amount of money you want to send and then bump phones. That's it.  The app uses PayPal to process the payments, so there are no new accounts to create, and it's totally free as long as you have your bank account linked to your PayPal account.  After the initial setup, there is absolutely no typing required, and you can pay someone in about 5 seconds.

Bump Pay solves the problem we all feel every day when splitting a lunch bill or buying movie tickets for a group of friends.  Inevitably someone doesn't have cash, and keeping track of IOUs is a pain.  In fact, Bump Pay was originally a tool that one of our developers created just for our own internal use to settle up after lunches out, but we liked it so much that we've decided to open it up.

The Bump Pay app is available for free from the App Store on iPhone and iPod touch at http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bump-pay/id512114276?mt=8. Download it now and let us know what you think! 

Bump Pay is available exclusively for iOS at launch and only on the App Store in the U.S.

Also, stay tuned for more from Bump Labs in the coming months.

-dave and the Bump team

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Pay3_setup

How are you using Bump?

We want to hear from you. So far we have heard from someone who bumps work related photos with employees throughout the day, families who share photos of their little ones with immediate family across the country and people who use Bump to capture contact info for all the people they meet along the way. There was also someone who met his wife thanks to Bump! So now we're searching for more stories - If you have a useful/funny/romantic/amazing story about how Bump has played a part in your life, email us! In return will send you some Bump schwag (think t-shirts, stickers, buttons...)

 

Here's what you need to know: Email address is info@bu.mp with the subject line "This one time, I used Bump..." You'll hear back from one of us within a couple of days. Can't wait to hear from you!

- Sadie

Bump joins forces with KDDI in Japan

I'm delighted to announce that as of March 1, 2012, Bump Technologies, Inc. will enter into an exciting partnership with KDDI Corporation, one of Japan's leading telecommunications providers. As part of this partnership, the latest version of the Bump Android app will be featured in the "Cool Apps" category of a new KDDI service called au Smart Pass, which falls under the company's personal mobile service brand au. 

au Smart Pass will include various other categories such as games, entertainment, handy tools and education. Users of the service will have access to over 500 popular apps, enhanced security, dedicated customer service, and 10GB of cloud storage for photos and videos for around $5 a month.

Recently, extensive research into our user base across the world revealed that our Japanese users are some of the most engaged in the population of Bump users. The partnership with KDDI is part of our commitment to the Japanese market and our millions of Japanese users. We here at Bump are looking forward to serving existing and welcoming new KDDI customers to the family of Bump users.

Hootan Mahallati
Head of Product
Bump Technologies, Inc.

 

A Brand New Bump

Today we're excited to launch Bump 3.0 for iOS and Android.   

This is a complete overhaul of the entire Bump experience, designed to make in-person, device-to-device interactions even simpler and more powerful, and comes almost exactly three years after we submitted Bump 1.0 to the Apple App Store for review in 2009.  In those three years, Bump has been downloaded by more than 75 million people around the world, making it one of the top mobile apps of all time.  Our users bump millions of items each day, and by next month, more than half a billion photos will have been bumped.  But what makes us most proud is that we've helped make mobile phones more useful by making device-to-device connections as simple as a physical bump, accessible to everyone, not just techies and experts.

When we launched Bump 1.0 three years ago, it was the typical "minimum viable product" -- it only did one thing (let you bump your contact info) and was very rough around the edges (Jake and I did the initial design in Powerpoint!).  But it was good enough to get millions of people to give it a try, which surprised and humbled us.  When it came time to build Bump 2.0, we wanted to satisfy all our users by building many of the features they had requested over the months.

With Bump 3.0, we've taken a different approach and focused on simple connections.  Over the last year, we've watched how people are using Bump, understood what they really love and don't love, and redesigned the app to focus on the two primary uses we kept seeing over and over from our users -- sharing contact information in social settings and sharing photos with close friends and family. Most product launches tout a series of new features; this one does not.  In a bulleted list of features, what we've removed (calendar, music, and app bumping on iOS) actually outnumbers what we've added (mutual friend discovery), but we believe that the result is an app that is simpler, faster, and more useful for everyone.

The most obvious change is the app's navigation.  Bump 2.0 used a springboard-type approach, showing each of the "things you can bump" on the homepage.  But what we found was that each user tends to latch onto one or two things at most, and showing all possible options on the homepage only resulted in confusion.  Bump 3.0 now uses a beautiful swipe-able layer to allow the user to toggle between the different functions of the app while always being ready to bump, no matter where you are in the app.

Bump 3.0 also highlights a feature that we think is one of the most delightful -- mutual friend discovery.  This was buried in the UI of Bump 2.0, but now every time you bump with someone new, Bump will magically show you all your mutual friends in your address books and also on social networks.  In testing Bump 3.0 internally, we've been amazed at how delightful the "how in the world could you possibly know that person?" moment can be, and we're excited to finally highlight this feature in the app.

So what's next?  With Bump 3.0, we think we've built the absolute best way to share contacts or photos in-person with others, in a way that is simple and delightful.  But our goal is to build tools that make all your device-to-device connections and interactions as meaningful and as simple as possible, so we have a lot more coming down the pipe.

-dave and the Bump team

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"Bumpkin" Carving

Last night we invited all the Bump employees and their families to join us in an evening of pre-halloween pumpkin carving. It was nice to take a little time out to relax. Everyone's been really heads down and focused on turning out bug fixes and new features, as well as some 'surprise' projects that you'll find out about later on! Pumpkin carving turned out to be the perfect way unwind - check out the pictures and admire the creativity that came from everyone, not just the Bump design team :)

3 years later...

Happy Birthday to us! It's hard to believe that 3 years ago today Bump was nothing but a mere daydream and a sketch on a napkin (see below for photo of orignal sketch!) Now Bump has grown to a 30 employee company, gone through 3 offices, and has been named the 7th most downloaded free app of all time. In fact, we're excited to announce that last night we achieved our 60 millionth download - just in time for Bump's 3rd birthday. We have lots to celebrate today!!

- Sadie

Firstbumpsketch

Bumping Around the World

When I interviewed at Bump, Seth, our local magician, asked me what my first blog post at Bump would be. I told him that I'd love to produce and show a heat map of bumps throughout the world, to get an understanding of the scope of our usage.

Well, it's been a few months, and I've produced a few types of maps, but last week we released an infographic centered around a world map of bumps performed in the month of August. I really wanted you all to see the larger version, because I think it really shows, better than anything else, the huge reach of Bump, and, well, just how awesome the world is.

Dave and Jake were kind enough to sign off, so here it is. It's quite large, so it may take some time to download. You really need to zoom in to appreciate the detail; if you just glance at a preview you'll lose the magic.

Things to look out for:

Uluru
The Nile
Saudi Arabia's Highway 40
The US Interstate System (how many freeways can you find?)

I still need to check with Seth to see if this satisfies him, but maybe you'd like to interview with him yourself? We do cool things here.

-chris


full image (3MB)

p.s. Thanks to the folks behind Mapnik. That was super helpful.

 

Thank you Bump users, all 50,000,000 of you!

When we built the first version of Bump back in the spring of 2009, we wanted to build a product to solve a problem we were personally facing -- we were sick and tired of manually entering people's names and numbers into our phones.  But when we launched the app on the App Store, we had no idea if anyone else in the world felt the same way or would care about Bump.  On day one, we were excited to get 222 downloads.  Now, in just over two years, we're proud to announce that more than 50 million people have now installed Bump on their phones!

Over that time, the Bump app has grown a lot too.  Pretty quickly, we realized we hadn't just built a contact information exchange app; what we really had built was a way to share any type of content and interact with others, physically, in the real world, as opposed to just the virtual worlds of social networks and email.  To give you an idea of how you can use Bump today, check out our latest video that Adam Lisagor helped us put together.

To celebrate the half-century mark, we've put together an infographic showing what, where, and how people are bumping today.  Bump is being used in all corners of the globe, from Alaska to Australia, Japan to the Falkland Islands, and even a single rogue bump in North Korea!  We've helped share more than a quarter billion photos, made millions of connections, and even paved the way to wedding bells...twice :)

From the entire team at Bump, a big thank you.  We feel like we're just getting started, so stay tuned for lots of new stuff coming your way soon.

-dave

2 Years, and 50 Million downloads later... Bump is back at YC (for the day)

Thanks to PG&E shutting off the electricity on our street, the Bump team has relocated to YCombinator's office for the day. For some of us, it's the first time in this room. However several people, especially the early Bump members, are feeling nostalgic being here today as many spent their first days at Bump coming in and out of this building for meetings and office hours with Paul Graham. The room is all a-buzz reminiscing about the early days and reflecting on how the app has evolved over the last 2 years. In fact, it's been exactly 2 years since Dave, Andy and Jake presented Bump in it's early stages to their YC class, investors and advisors during YC's Demo Day. It's funny to watch the first video they used for the presentation and see what we thought was impressive then, and compare it to where the app stands today. I asked Dave what his favorite part about the last 2 years and he said this:

"Building the team. When we started YC, it was just Andy, Jake, and me. We hired our first two people during that summer, but now we have about 30 super dedicated people working on all aspects of Bump. I remember a specific moment in early 2010, when I looked up from my laptop and saw the then 10 people all working on Bump. It's an amazing feeling to see a great team all working together on an idea that popped into your head one day; to be honest, I got a little emotional in that moment :)"

So thanks, YC, for helping make this all possible!

- Sadie