Bump Blog
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Hack!
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-Sadie -
Bump 2.0 Now Available on Android!
Finally…the wait is over. Bump 2.0 has made it to Android!Not only is it faster and more reliable than the previous version, but you no longer need to be envious of the new design your iOS friends have been enjoying. Send as many photos, contacts, and apps as you want, just by bumping phones, and you now get a complete history of everything you’ve sent or received with Bump, along with when and where you bumped. And with this new update you can bump your friends to create a connection and later send messages, photos, and apps back and forth for free, even if you’re miles apart, complete with instant notifications.Thanks for patiently bearing with us – we hope this update was worth the wait :)And we’re not stopping here. Expect to see many new features rolled out over the next several months!We want to hear your feedback for bump 2.0 - so send comments/suggestions/complaints to support@bu.mp-The Bump Team -
WHERE should we eat tonight?
Ever been at odds with your friends about where to go to dinner or what to do with your Saturday afternoon? Well, thanks to great people at WHERE Inc, you can bump your way to easy decision making! The app WHERE (which helps you discover and save your favorite local places to eat, drink, and play) now lets you bump with your friends and, based on your interests and saved favorite spots, will recommend a perfect compromise that you both will be happy with. Piece of cake!
The app is available on the iPhone and Android platforms and has a ton of other great features like sending you personalized recommendations, giving you access coupons to nearby places and even telling you see which movies are playing near you or which gas station has cheaper gas! It’s free on the iTunes App Store and the Android Market, so give it a try! We’re super excited about it!
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Bump 2.4 for iOS: Now with App Sharing!
We’ve just released version 2.4 of our iOS app with a big new feature: App Sharing!
This has been our biggest feature request of late, and it makes sense as to why. With more than 300,000 apps in the iTunes App Store, finding the best apps has become quite difficult. Who wants to sort through the 100 weather apps just to find WeatherBug? But what is the most common conversation among a group of iPhone users? ”Hey, what cool apps do you have?”This new features makes that answer as simple as selecting your favorite apps from your phone, and bumping them to your friends. They’ll get direct links in Bump to download the apps from iTunes. (Sorry, you still have to pay for paid apps!)What I’m most proud of with this new feature is that a small group of developers here at Bump decided to knock this feature out during the Holidays as a side project. When the rest of the company came back at the beginning of January, we were pleasantly surprised that they had App Sharing mostly ready to go! This is actually pretty typical here at Bump — we want developers and designers who take ownership of the product and feel that they can build what our users want, even it is isn’t an “official” project.If you are a designer or developer, check out http://bu.mp/jobs. We’re hiring!-dave -
Bump - A Love Story
Bump is connecting people even beyond the realm of social networking. We got this email a few months ago:
Date: Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 4:20 PM
Subject: How You Guys Helped Me Meet The Girl of My DreamsHey guys, wanted to shoot you a quick note to say thank you. You helped me meet the girl of my dreams…There was this girl that I thought was cute and had talked to a few times, her name is Lauren, I invited her and a mutual friend (who I knew better) to my birthday party. Little did I know that our mutual friend wanted to set us up.So, we were all sitting at my birthday party and talk of the iPhone 4 came up, which was coming out in a few weeks. Our mutual friend asked if we were familiar with the app Bump. I knew of you guys but hadn’t installed Bump on my iPhone before. Lauren, the girl I was interested in, had Bump.Well our mutual friend, was like Justin you should download it and you and Lauren can show me how it works. I was oblivious at first but quickly caught on. I knew I was getting Lauren’s phone # out of the exchange.I quickly downloaded Bump. Lauren and I bumped.I texted Lauren the next day with the info from Bump. We were dating within a week. That was 5 months ago.Lauren and I are madly in love and I plan on proposing in the next couple of months.Just wanted to shoot you guys a note to say thanks.- JustinAnd we just received another from him!Date: Wed, Jan 12, 2011 at 11:06 AM
Subject: Re: How You Guys Helped Me Meet The Girl of My DreamsHey guys, just wanted to give you all an update. Lauren and I are now
engaged and getting married May 28th! Thanks again and yes feel free
to blog about our story!BTW - Congrats on raising your last round! Very exciting!- JustinDo you have a fun story about how Bump helped you connect to someone unexpectedly? We’d love to hear it!! -
A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year :)
2010 was quite the year for Bump in many dimensions. A year ago, we were a team of six, fresh on the heels of our first round of financing. At the time, we were in the process of completely redesigning and rethinking our popular contact exchange app with a bigger vision in mind. Today, our 15 person team supports more than 25 million users who have installed Bump on their iOS and Android devices (we’ve added more than a million users in the last two weeks alone!). It seems you guys are digging our new features! Daily traffic has increased more than five times in the last five months :)
Bump on iOS now allows you to share photos, music, contacts, calendar events, text messages, and connect on social networks, even when people aren’t close to one another. And, a new Android app is in the works. We’re continuing on our path to make Bump the easiest and simplest way to interact not only with those around you, but also your friends around the world.
Today, we’re excited to announce that over the holidays we raised a second round of funding — $16 million led by Andreessen Horowitz, along with Sequoia, Sherpalo (Ram Shriram), SV Angel (Ron Conway), and Felicis Ventures (Aydin Senkut). We are thrilled to have Marc Andreessen join Greg McAdoo of Sequoia on our board. We’re sure that the experience and vision they will bring to our board will be a tremendous help as we continue to expand the scope of Bump.
This round of financing solidifies our priorities to build a world-class engineering and product organization here in Silicon Valley (did we mention we’re hiring?). We started Bump because we were frustrated that our phones were so useless for directly interacting with those around us, and we’ve only begun to scratch the surface of what is possible when it comes to valuable mobile interactions in the real world. Stay tuned!
-dave and the Bump Team
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Bump at the Cosmopolitan - January 7th
We’re super excited to announce that for the first time ever Bump is co-hosting an exclusive networking event with Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas and Marquee Nightclub during the 2011 International Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas on Friday, January 7th. How do you get in? By bumping! We’re blasting the invitation to iPhone Bump users in the Las Vegas area today, but there’s a catch. To make the invitation valid you must bump it to 3 other people. Then those people can unlock their invitation by bumping 3 more people, and so on. We’re only admitting 200 people to Bump at the Cosmopolitan, so hurry up and get your bump on! But don’t just stop after 3 bumps because the person who bumps the invitation the most times will win a free weekend at the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas -
The Virtual Bump
Ever wish you could bump with your friends that live far away, but are never close enough to actually physically bump them? Well we’d like to introduce you to the ‘Virtual Bump,’ now available for iOS users. This allows you to connect with your friends in your address book that also have the Bump app even if you can’t physically bump their device. Here’s how you set it up:1) Make sure that the person you want to connect with is in your address book, and that you both have the latest version of Bump installed on your devices.2) Fill out your email address and/or phone number, and have your friends do the same. This information will help Bump identify who you want to connect with.3) Select ‘Yes’ when Bump asks permission to have access to your address book.4) If you are friends on Facebook, you and your friends can sign into your accounts within Bump which will also help in the matching process.Once this is done Bump will generate a list of people that you will be able to instantly connect with simply by clicking the green check mark next to their names, and voilà! You’re connected and able to send all kinds of stuff back and forth for free. If you’re having problems setting Bump up, feel free to shoot us an email and we’ll be happy to troubleshoot for you: support@bu.mp -
Bump 2.1 ready for download
Yesterday we released Bump 2.1 for iPhones that includes some great new features.
- Photo Multipicker: Now iPhone Bump users can select 1, 2, or a whole album of photos to bump to your friend! (Hint: Make sure your location services are turned on when you bump photos, it will be much more successful!)
- Pinch and zoom capability enabled in the photo viewer. You can also view your photos in landscape!
- Location snapshot: you can send your friend a Google maps snapshot of your current location in the chat screen.
An updated Bump for Android is still in the works; it will be released as soon as possible!
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Bump a Longcat!
The Android Longcat app skyrocketed to the top of our favorite bumpable apps list this morning when we created a long 5 Android looooongcat. We hope the guy organizing the Longcat flashmob this Saturday in San Francisco has a great turn out. If a 5 phone longcat was that fun, I can’t imagine how amazing a 100 phone longcat would be! You can download the Longcat app free from the Android Market
