
Bump (YC S09) has been acquired by Google - olivercameron
http://blog.bu.mp/post/61411611006/bump-google
======
geuis
There are reasons NFC isn't taking off.

1) It's a technology, not a feature. Many companies, mostly Android handset
makers but also Blackberry and Nokia, have included it in their devices as
"yet another selling point". It was included not as a way to make a better
device or experience for customers, but as a gimmick for upselling handsets.

2) It's insecure. Holy hell, Batman. Just spend a couple minutes reading
through the security section of the NFC Wikipedia entry. It's insanely easy to
read transactions remotely, _modify data_ , and jam signals. Even more, there
is no hint of security built into the technology. None. No RF signal
modification detection, no encryption.

3) Unreliable. While it sounds like a good idea on paper, for the most part it
just doesn't work very well in practice. There's too many subpar
implementations in too many devices. Just because you have a good one in your
handset doesn't help when most of the limited ones available in public are
cheap.

There's a damn good reason Apple hasn't included NFC. It's broken. They
definitely put out crappy products from time to time (don't forget Ping, iPod
socks, Maps, Siri, MobileMe, and about 300 variations of the Mac before Jobs
came back). But NFC hasn't proven to be something useful or valuable. They
won't include it. Perhaps something like it in the future, but never NFC in
its current form.

~~~
tjohns
NFC supports encryption, which solves the eavesdropping and unauthorized
modification problems. It's done at the card level as an optional feature,
since not all applications need encryption.

MIFARE DESFire comes to mind as one of the more popular cards with encryption,
though I do recall there's others as well:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIFARE#MIFARE_DESFire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIFARE#MIFARE_DESFire)

And as for it being unreliable: [citation needed]. I've never had problems
sending data to another NFC-enabled device. The only time I've ever had it not
work was back when phones with non-NXP chipsets first started to appear on the
market, and some folks were still selling standalone tags that used NXP's
older proprietary format (MIFARE Classic) rather than the standardized format
(NFC Forum). That's rarely a problem these days.

~~~
yasth
I don't think geuis is saying the actual communication is unreliable, but the
actions are. I.e. the NFC part works, but the whole touch to share (say a
video or whatever) part has more troubles. Which is a problem even though it
is just a failing of handling things hugher up the stack it makes it look like
NFC is problematic.

~~~
tjohns
That's a fair point.

The lower level stuff and NDEF format is well standardized. The higher level
operations are not nearly as well standardised right now, even more so when
you're dealing with large files, which will require a handoff to Bluetooth or
WiFi Direct.

In NFC's defense, it's only recently (4.2, Jelly Bean) that Android even
supported transferring large files via Bluetooth handoff, so hopefully that
stuff will improve with time.

~~~
geuis
Fair point too. I hope it does improve in time.

------
Timothee
Even though I hadn't thought about this company for a long time, _just
yesterday evening_ I was wondering "whatever happened to Bump?" and checked
their site.

Since the start they've had interesting technology (though of the kind that
looks easier to implement than it really is) but, in my opinion at least,
never found a killer app for it. I remember when they had that webpage where
you would hit the space bar with your phone and that would be enough to create
the connection. That was really cool, but it felt like a "cool trick" rather
than something I ended up using.

edit: I didn't want to come off as negative and I'm sorry if it reads this
way. Their solutions are very innovative and inventive, and _really_ feel
magical. I just wish it had caught on more… Hopefully Google is planning on
using the technology in many places. It would make sense of course for it to
be part of the core of Android, but the syncing between mobile and desktop
could be very useful as well.

------
yapcguy
So did Bump fail or is this considered a successful exit?

I met some Bump folk a year ago. The company had a lot of employees and still
wasn't making any money.

They basically burnt all their investors money. Calling this an acquisition is
bending the truth.

~~~
nl
_Calling this an acquisition is bending the truth._

Umm. Google bought them - that's an acquisition no matter if they are making
money or not (unless "acquisition" has been redefined somehow)

~~~
eigenvector
The announcement doesn't actually say that Google bought them. It just says
that the Bump team is joining Google.

~~~
yapcguy
I wish we could have more detail on these kind of transactions.

Someone glancing at the headline would assume this was a successful exist for
a YCombinator backed company.

However, perhaps any remaining cash was returned to the original investors,
less costs of liquidation, and any assets were "sold" to Google for $1 with
some of the development team moving to Google as temporary contractors or
probationary hires, rather than immediate permanent hires.

------
JOnAgain
"... stay tuned for future updates"

read, Google will likely be shutting down our services within the next 6
months.

~~~
ok_craig
I agree, any service ever created should be forced to continue to run
perpetually regardless value, user interest, or cost to the company running
it.

~~~
derefr
I think you're confusing an "is" statement for an "ought" statement. Google
probably _will_ be shutting Bump down. Is that a bad thing? The GP comment
didn't say anything about that one way or another; just that it's probably
going to happen, whether its defensible or not.

------
andrewljohnson
4 years of hard work and novel thinking, followed by acquisition.

I don't know the Bump team, but I respect the effort and the outcome.

------
Cherian_Abraham
Google acquires Bump. It's not the "bumping" that's valuable. It's figuring
out two people are in proximity to each other that allows them to bump -
that's Gold.

~~~
baddox
Is that a very difficult problem? I thought they just grab the location from
the phone, send it to their service, and their service looks for other bumps
in the physical and temporal vicinity. It's a rather clever solution, but not
exactly a technology that seems worth acquiring, unless there are some patents
or tricky performance optimizations I'm missing.

~~~
jamwt
Can't elaborate, but there's quite a bit more to it than that. The rabbit hole
is pretty deep.

~~~
baddox
Can anyone speculate? The only thing I'm coming up with is that it might
require a geo index for quickly calculating the distances between a huge
number of location pairs.

~~~
Cherian_Abraham
[http://www.quora.com/Bump-Acquired-by-Google-2013/How-
does-B...](http://www.quora.com/Bump-Acquired-by-Google-2013/How-does-Bump-
work)

~~~
11185d
Blocked once again by Quoras no reading more than a few words of the answer
without logging in rule:(

~~~
zemo
tack on a share=1 query param at the end of the url.
[http://www.quora.com/Google-Acquires-Bump-
September-2013/How...](http://www.quora.com/Google-Acquires-Bump-
September-2013/How-does-Bump-work?share=1)

------
jaredsohn
For awhile, I've thought that the problem with Bump is that it requires that
the other person shares the same app (although recently I discovered that you
can ask the other person to browse to [http://bu.mp](http://bu.mp)). So I have
been working on the side on an HTML5 mobile solution that allows sharing
contact information and messages with people nearby by just asking them to go
to a URL.

The site needs a big UI and workflow revamp (already worked out on paper) and
won't scale right now (it just uses a single instance of Meteor and a MongoDB
database and doesn't handle Internet-scale abuse.)

You can see the current iteration at
[http://www.near.im/](http://www.near.im/).

~~~
Rygu
I was trying it on my iMac and phone, opened the website on both devices, then
it somewhat disappointed me (should have looked better) by asking to sign in
with Facebook. A login-less demo would sell itself better.

~~~
jaredsohn
Thanks for checking it out.

Yeah, the UI is ugly and overly complicated right now. It is really more of a
technical demo and a project for me to experiment with Meteor on at this point
(it has zero active users.)

I am presently requiring a login to post to (in theory) prevent flooding it
with spam. The person who is receiving the message does not need to log in. I
have thought about removing the Facebook login requirement either for now
(when there aren't many users) or permanently (need to have a way to prevent
spam.)

------
slykat
I always thought bump would be a compelling technology if it was baked into an
OS liked Android. The main issue was getting past the hurdle of convincing
others to download it - no one wanted to download an app just to exchange
contact info in a moment of need.

If was already on your phone I could see users adopting it for things like
contacts & photo exchange.

------
jasonlotito
So, this leaves everyone who was building something on top of Bump in a very
odd position. Do we continue building on Bump, or do we work to implement
something else on our own.

Please note, I'm not saying they are wrong for being acquired by Google. Just
saying that as of right now, building on the Bump platform just got a lot more
unsure.

------
gkoberger
Finally. Bump is cool, but this is one of those technologies that will only
work if baked right in to the OS.

~~~
hboon
That could have been said for Dropbox too. There's pros and cons to each
approach. If Bump was built into a single OS, it'd limit its interoperability.

~~~
benologist
Dropbox provides massive utility for laptops and desktops as well.

~~~
Florin_Andrei
To me, Dropbox is useful precisely because it works everywhere.

------
kmfrk
The logo's a cute idea. Nice to see an acquisition statement with some heart
instead of the boilerplate examples[1].

[1]:
[http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com](http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com)

------
alexfringes
Another step towards NFC being skipped as a truly impactful technology?

~~~
yid
How is it being skipped? As an example, parking meters in San Francisco are
almost all NFC-equipped. Google's flagship phones have all been NFC-enabled.
The future looks bright for NFC...

~~~
trimbo
I have a Nexus 4 and live in SF. The NFC feature on the meters _almost never_
works. Probably 10% of the time. I have to enter the meter ID most of the
time.

The biggest problem with NFC, etc... it's still significantly faster to swipe
a credit card! Getting my phone out, unlocking it with a code, making sure the
screen stays on while I stand in line (for e.g. Starbucks). This future is for
the birds.

~~~
yid
Interesting. I have an iPhone so I'm never able to use the NFC feature.
However, I find that opening the app and typing in the meter number is quite
fast, since I can walk away while doing it. Also, the ability to extend my
parking remotely is pretty awesome.

~~~
trimbo
I agree, that is a killer feature. Except the additional charge on top of it.
:(

------
veritas20
Would have loved to see Bump pivot to an in-person transaction verification
and facilitation app. Imagine having Bump as the intermediary of in-person
transactions for large purchases coordinated over Craiglist sales.

------
abbott
Google acquired an extremely talented team.

------
mindotus
Congrats to the Bump team! Would be interesting to see where the future leads
with Bump & Google and how it integrates into Android!

------
100k
Good luck to the Bump team at Google!

------
wowaname
Ten years from now: /.*/ has been acquired by Google.

------
savrajsingh
Congrats Dave and team!

~~~
kalid
Agreed, congrats Dave!

------
X4
What is Bump? Was that that business-card sharing app I remember from the
past?

