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 :)
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!!
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.
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.
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!
Last week Bump hosted the first ever intern hackathon competition. We set up workspaces and plenty of snacks in the back part of our office and let the interns get to work on whichever project they wanted to pursue. They knew they only had 24 hours to get it done, at the end of which they would present what they accomplished in front of the rest of the company. The interns made great use of that time, teaming up, brainstorming and working straight through the night. Friday afternoon a sleepy but happy group of interns demoed their projects. The outcome was awesome! It was a close competition - but only 2 could win. These are the 2 projects that ended up taking home the prizes.
FIRST PLACE - Bill Split
Ted, Ethan and Will worked together to come up with a really easy way to split a bill with friends using the Bump app. Their UI was clean and simple, the app was intuitive and a great usecase for the Bump app!
SECOND PLACE - Bump Pong
Tomer and Brian teamed up with Bernardo (Bump employee) to create bumpable program to keep track of the winners and losers of pingpong matches that take place in the office. We take this game seriously!
It was really impressive to see what these guys could create in a 24 hour window. We celebrated with tacos and happy hour when the demos were done - but most of the interns cut out early to catch up on sleep. Definitely deserved!
Summer at Bump is in full swing! We kicked it off right by moving into a big beautiful new office right next to the Mountain View Caltrain station where we host interoffice pingpong tournaments, afternoon massages, and yoga classes. From these classy new digs we launched the iOS Bump redesign with beautiful graphics for a whole new look and feel (check it out on iTunes!) We soon topped that by taking on our fleet of interns - all 12 of them! They've already proven to be really productive group. With their help we were able to launch the 'location' feature for Android, do a bunch of user testing and data gathering. They also helped create a Bumpable keg to fuel our office happy hours and social gatherings! We're super excited and proud to have them on board, can't wait to see what else they'll help us with this summer. You'll be able to read all about it on their very own intern blog - stay tuned for details!
Last week Bump hosted a magic show by our very own Seth Raphael who is also a TED Fellow, MIT Media Lab Alum, and magician! Seth combines computer science and magic to create a cutting-edge form of entertainment that is truly a unique experience. We invited family, friends, and friends of friends to come hang out with the Bump team, have a few drinks, and experience a little bit of the magic behind the scenes of Bump Technologies. After the show we invited everyone to come back to our new office for food, drinks and games.
The turn out was awesome! We met a lot of interesting new people, Seth put on a really great show, the after party was packed and went late - great times had by all!
If you're interested in attending Bump events shoot us an email support@bu.mp and tell us why you'd like to be part of the Bump network!
The hack-a-thon was a huge success! At the end of a solid ~36 hours of hacking everyone demo'ed what they had been working on, and I must say everything was really impressive. There were 4 projects that won prizes:
Most Polished (closest to shippable): Send Hugs
One group decided to add a little love to the Bump app by creating a 'send hugs' feature. A new way of sending a message that's more special than just sending a text. The receiver gets a duckie holding a customized sign on their Bump screen. He's super cute!
Most Interesting (least like what we would work on normally): Bumperator
Another group decided to use Bump in a completely new way - to turn on and off a keg! Essentially you'd Bump a keg which would then automatically dispense a beer and send you a message so you can chat with the keg. You can ask the keg questions about your party, such as who has had the most beers, or the ratio of girls to guys. We even purchased a kegerator for our new office, so we plan to try this one out as soon as possible :)
Most Technicall Challenging: Redacted
Sorry, can't talk about this one yet; we gotta keep soooome secrets. But don't worry, it's super freaking awesome. ;)
Overall Winner: Bump DJ
Kind of like a jukebox for your iPhone. One person turns on the DJ mode from within the Bump app, and then multiple people can bump a song to the 'host' phone that would be added to a playlist. A perfect feature for a road trip or a house party!
We're making small tweaks to these projects but we're super excited to get at least a couple of them released for everyone to check out. We think letting people be creative and giving them the flexibility to build what they can dream up is super important, so we do these hackathons on a regular basis. So again, if you have suggestions for things you'd like to see be made 'bumpable' send them our way!
Smack in the middle of Bump's second ever hack-a-thon, 4 pots of coffee in and you can almost hear the gears turning. Last hack-a-thon resulted in some pretty awesome projects, one of which included a Bump photobooth that we demo'ed at the Stanford Cool Products Expo 2011 (check out the video http://www.coincident.tv/cpx/?media=ctvcontent/bump.ctv).
This time we're a few employees bigger and a few months wiser, there are plenty of creative juices flowing tonight and I'm sure by tomorrow there will be some impressive new Bump implementations to show off. Have any suggestions of what you'd like to see us build? We want to hear it! info@bu.mp Or better yet, write your own cool bumpable app with the Bump API! http://bu.mp/API
