Bump Blog
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Happy 4th Birthday, Bump!
4 years ago today Bump was released to the app store. Since then we’ve had 125 million downloads, sent 1 billion photos, and grown the company to 25 employees. What a great 4 years it has been! Time to celebrate :)
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Bump your Computer
Today we are updating the web version of Bump at http://bu.mp to be universally compatible with Bump on iOS and Android. This means that starting today, everything you can bump between phones now also works both to and from any computer in the world. Photos, videos, contacts, files…everything. There’s no setup at all — just go to http://bu.mp on your computer, open Bump on your phone, and bump the spacebar key! Bump is now your unlimited USB flash drive that is always with you!No one ever says “I sure look forward to syncing my phone with my computer!”. 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. And who doesn’t have a slight twinge of anxiety each time they press “sync” that the contacts on their phone will be overwritten with outdated contacts on their computer? It should be congnitively simpler.We first launched the web version of Bump 9 months ago, initially only supporting photos, and only in one direction, from phones to computers. People loved it. The number of daily users of http://bu.mp has grown 50% in the last two months alone and now represents a small but significant fraction of overall Bump usage. With today’s update, we’ve enabled many new use cases people have asked for, including:+ Save your photos and videos from your phone to your computer hard drive+ Back up all your contacts on your computer and reload them on a new device+ Pick up a presentation from your desk computer and bump it to the conference room computerWe hope you enjoy it!-dave and the Bump team
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Flock for Android is here!
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Bump - Simple Connections
Ever wonder how many bumps are happening per second? Or how many football fields Bump could fill with the photos that are shared every day? We did too - so we did some digging into our mysterious world and discovered some amazing facts about Bump. Check out our newest infographic and be amazed by facts such as the total number of things our top user has shared, and the exact time of day that Bump is used the most!
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New! Transfer Files using Bump
We’ve been continually amazed and humbled by the tremendous growth of Bump. In just a few years, Bump has been downloaded by more than 100 million people across dozens of countries, quickly becoming one of the most popular mobile apps of all time. In addition to connecting and sharing contact information, photo sharing has emerged as one of the most popular uses of Bump. Bump users share 2 to 3 million photos every day, between friends and family and also between mobile devices and computers using http://bu.mp.
One of the most requested features from Bump users has been to be able to bump files between devices. We’ve heard from real estate professionals who’d like to bump property listings at open houses, from teachers who’d like to collect homework assignments in class using Bump, and thousands of others who’d like the simplicity and ease of Bump when managing and sharing their files. Because really, when you have a file on your phone that you want to give to someone standing right next to you, isn’t it frustrating that you have to email or text them? We think it should be simpler than that.
‘Tis the season for giving, so we’ve decided to release a project that started in Bump Labs (our internal idea incubator) that solves this problem. We call it Bump Files.
Today we’ve updated the Bump app to let you bump any file on your device, including videos, documents, presentations, spreadsheets, PDFs, and more. Just select the file you’d like to share and bump it to a friend; it’s that easy. This new feature is available on both iOS and Android and can be found on the App Store at https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bump/id305479724?mt=8 and on Google Play at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bumptech.bumpga
Be sure to stay tuned – we’re continuing to work on this Bump Labs project and are planning some exciting things for file sharing in the future, like bumping to computers and integrating with 3rd party cloud file services.
Ho ho ho,
-dave and the Bump team
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Introducing Flock
Our mission at Bump is to help people create simple connections in the real world using mobile devices. We’ve seen first-hand the power of simplicity — what started as a side project to solve a personal frustration with manually typing new friends’ phone numbers into our phones has become an all-time top 10 app in almost every country in the world, facilitating millions of contact and photo transfers each day. Later this summer, the 100 millionth person will download Bump.
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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
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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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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
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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 MahallatiHead of ProductBump Technologies, Inc.
