Bump Blog

Happy 4th Birthday, Bump!

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 17:41:00 -0400

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 :)

Bump your Computer

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 19:09:00 -0500

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have a slight twinge of anxiety each time they press “sync” that the contacts on their phone will be overwritten with outdated contacts on their computer?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 computer

We hope you enjoy it!

-dave and the Bump team

Flock for Android is here!

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 15:18:00 -0500

Today we’re launching Flock for Android! Get it on Google Play here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bumptech.flock

We launched Flock for iOS four months ago to make sharing photos simpler and easier. Flock keeps track of the photos you take together with friends and family and magically brings all the photos from each person’s phone together into a single shared album. Too many of the world’s memories were being lost and forgotten, locked away on your friends’ or family’s phones. We introduced a new design paradigm powered by some smart algorithms so that Flock could work without users even thinking about it — it’s one of the first apps to pioneer this space.

And users love it. Flock is being used at weddings, parties, nights out on the town, family gatherings, and everything in between. The average active Flock user receives 26 photos every week taken by others during moments together with friends and family. These are photos that people otherwise would never see — the other 95% of photos that don’t end up being shared on Facebook or Instagram but that hold the real story of our lives.

We’re excited to bring Flock to Android today. Android has been growing at unprecedented rates, and even those folks not using Android have friends and family who are, so we expect this launch to make the Flock experience better for everyone. As with our iOS version, we’ve taken care to make sure that Flock for Android is a great experience for people, and we’re experimenting with a few new UI ideas that are well-suited for Android. Android developers and designers might also want to read about some of the unique challenges our team faced while building Flock for Android.

Flock for Android is free on Google Play here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bumptech.flock

Happy holidays from all of us working on Flock! We hope it comes in handy during your holiday celebrations.

-dave and the Flock team

ps, Check out some of the latest Bump and Flock stats in our new infographic!

See the full gallery on Posterous

Bump - Simple Connections

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 14:34:00 -0500

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!

New! Transfer Files using Bump

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 18:47:00 -0500

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

Introducing Flock

Thu, 26 Jul 2012 08:00:00 -0400

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.

But recently, another frustration finally caught up with us: distributing photos taken together with friends and family among the people who were actually there. It’s a problem that we all face. While there are lots of great ways to publish photos taken on our mobile phones, we still find ourselves nagging our friends to email or upload their photos. We still take the same group photo on four different phones. And despite our best intentions, we often get caught up in other distractions and forget to share the memories we capture on our devices with the people who care the most. As mobile continues its explosive growth, we are taking more and more photos together everyday, and yet the vast majority of these photos stay locked away on other people’s phones. It’s archaic.

We think we’ve finally solved this problem the right way. We call it Flock, and it’s launching today.

Flock finds the photos you take together with family and friends and magically brings all the photos from each person’s phone together into a single shared album.

Here’s how you use it: Install Flock along with your friends and family. And then forget about it. Full stop. Whenever it finds photos you’ve taken while with your Facebook friends, it will send you a push notification with a one-touch way to share those photos with them. When your friends choose to share their photos from the same event, you’ll get a notification taking you straight to the combined group album.

Flock is not just a brand new app; we see it as a brand new *kind* of app. While most apps today jockey for our ever-dwindling time and attention, attempting to become one of the apps that we think about the most, Flock is different. We designed Flock so you don’t have to think about it at all. You just live your life like you already do. Spend time with your friends and family; take photos with whatever camera app you prefer. There’s no work for you at all, really. Flock uses new battery-friendly location technology and sophisticated algorithms to magically know which of your Facebook friends you are with when photos are taken. After you leave your group hike, or the night out on the town, or Thanksgiving dinner, Flock will check if anyone wants to share the photos they took and then bring those photos together into a single group album for everyone to enjoy. And because most photos taken by iOS devices are geotagged, Flock can even work backwards in time from before you installed the app! So if you and your friends and family install the app today, you’ll likely unlock lost memories that were trapped on each other’s phones for years.

We’ve been using Flock internally for a while now, and we’re excited to share it with the world today. We hope it helps you better experience shared memories and simplifies your life just a bit more.

We made a short video that we think shows off the power and simplicity of Flock. Flock is free and available exclusively on the App Store for iPhone and iPod touch at http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/flock-photos-together/id543421080?ls=1&mt=8.

-dave and the Flock team

Bump Photos to your Computer!

Thu, 24 May 2012 07:39:00 -0400

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

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

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 10:29:00 -0400

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

See the full gallery on Posterous

How are you using Bump?

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 12:27:00 -0400

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

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 20:20:00 -0500

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

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 08:04:00 -0500

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

See the full gallery on Posterous

"Bumpkin" Carving

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 15:49:00 -0400

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 :)

See the full gallery on Posterous

3 years later...

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 14:05:00 -0400

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

Bumping Around the World

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 14:22:00 -0400

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!

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 13:49:00 -0400

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)

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 19:27:00 -0400

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

Summer Intern Hackathon

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 20:30:48 -0400

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!

- Sadie

See the full gallery on Posterous

Summer at Bump

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 17:11:00 -0400

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!

- Sadie

See the full gallery on Posterous

The Magic of Bump

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 12:53:34 -0400

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!

- Sadie

See the full gallery on Posterous

Success!

Fri, 03 Jun 2011 15:59:47 -0400

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!

See the full gallery on Posterous