

Bump Technologies (YC S09): The Quest To Destroy The Business Card - drm237
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/08/y-combinator-endorses-bump-technologies-in-the-quest-to-destroy-the-business-card/

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sachinag
I lost my iPhone, so I can't use this, so here's my question: if I bump phones
with someone, does their information go into my Address Book?

You have to earn your way into my Address Book on my phone by getting drunk
with me or being related by blood (seriously, no exceptions - same as with
Facebook).

Business card hate is way overblown; there's a nice natural segregation and
there's enough room to write notes for follow-ups. I mean, business cards are
a _solution_ to the problem of exchanging information amongst casual
acquaintences; they're not a problem _themselves_. I think this is where
"business card replacements" (and we've had them since the Palm Pilot days)
fail.

~~~
mahmud
_You have to earn your way into my Address Book on my phone by getting drunk
with me or being related by blood (seriously, no exceptions - same as with
Facebook)._

You might see your life enriched a whole lot IF you just removed that law of
yours. I would go a step further and say, dedicate an afternoon a month just
to go through your cell phone contacts and say hell to everyone you don't
remember speaking to recently.

No man is an island, unless he is surrounded by the vomit of his drinking
buddies and cousins ;-)

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vaksel
Good app, but I doubt it'll gain traction in the business world. The business
cards are too ingrained into our society.

Its like the don't shake hands techcrunch post, I'm not going to stop shaking
hands, just because techcrunch thinks its an outdated method of greeting
people.

~~~
dgallagher
Biz cards are a pain in the butt:

1) You've got to design and pay to print them. If titles or contact info
changes, that's a re-print. The cost matters a lot particularly to the SoHo
market.

2) You've got to carry them around with you everywhere to hand out. Usually
this is in a metal case that's kinda cumbersome in a pocket shared with an
iPhone/BlackBerry already.

3) When someone hands you one, you've gotta stick it in your pocket and not
lose it.

4) After you bring them to your office, you need to file them somehow (scan
them, manually enter them into Outlook/whatever).

I've seen people at hedge funds buy expensive scanners which plug into Outlook
and let you scan this stuff in. It does OCR on the cards and auto-creates
contacts for you. The scanners are around $200/each, plug into your desktop,
and are a tad annoying to install and config. The cards get tossed into the
trash the moment it's in Outlook.

If you don't buy a scanner for every employee, that's time wasted while they
type said card info into Outlook.

While something like this won't "kill" business cards in the business world,
it'll offer a nice alternative.

Here's an idea for an iPhone App that'll let someone with an iPhone do-away
with biz cards all together: A scanner app using the iPhone camera. Take a
snapshot* of someone's biz card, OCR it, and bam, it's in your contacts.
Easier said than done, of course. But it eliminates steps 3 and 4 above,
making your life easier when dealing with "legacy" business cards. :)

*Yeah, yeah, we all know how good the iPhone camera is at close-ups. Maybe the next revision? ;)

~~~
there
the video shows it takes about 15 seconds to launch the app, tap the button,
and exchange data. now add in time to pull your phone out and unlock it
(possibly with a pin). i just timed myself and it took 10 seconds to take the
phone out of my pocket, slide the unlock bar, put in my pin, push the home
button to get out of the last app i was in, and scroll to the home screen of
apps.

so 25 seconds may not seem like a long time, but realistically, standing in
front of someone for 25 seconds doing nothing is pretty awkward. really, try
it. go up to someone and stand there counting to 25 in your head. now consider
doing that in front of someone you don't really know (otherwise why would you
be exchanging information?)

now consider pulling a business card out of that same pocket and handing it to
the person. they can say thanks and put it in their pocket without even
looking at it, then process it later.

~~~
jmintz
Business cards are a pain if you ever want to use the information. Most people
don't type them up so if you ever need the information you have to scramble to
find the card so you can call/email the person. Once you factor in the time it
takes to store the information on a business card Bump is more competitive
time wise (but of course I am biased).

~~~
wheels
At most of the business mixers that I've gone to people later add the contacts
to LinkedIn, at which point they can grab a vCard if they need to import it
elsewhere. It might be worth looking into the LinkedIn API to see if you can
try to get a similar workflow with Bump.

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omouse
Could you make the process any more complicated? I hear there's this thing
called Bluetooth and all you have to do is activate it and zap the phone
directly with it. Why communicate with the "cloud" at all?

~~~
jmintz
Bluetooth is surprisingly difficult to get working between different phones.
When phones actually do recognize each other it takes a long time to pair.
Once pairing is completed (even between iPhones this takes ~45 when it works)
transfers speeds are fast. Communicating with our server in the cloud is a
compromise, but it eliminates the cross-platform compatability and pairing
problems of Bluetooth.

~~~
omouse
As someone else noted, you're still waiting around for ~25 seconds with Bump.
That's an incremental improvement and users may be slightly more forgiving of
the time.

Have you looked into Bonjour?

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blhack
How well does this scale?

They sortof glossed over the ninjitsu that is being used to link the two
"bumps" together. My guess is that (since internet access is required), it
syncs a clock within the bump application to the bump server, then looks for
phones that were "bumped" at the same time.

I'm sure I'm wrong, and would love to hear of other ways that this is
happening.

If I'm not, how does this scale up to the millions or hundreds of millions of
users that it would require to actually _replace_ the business card (which is
what it sounds like it wants to do).

Even if it isn't at millions, how well does it function at events where lots
and lots of people are "bumping" (clever name, I have already verbed it)?

Finally...and this is what would--to me--kill it: the blackberry does not have
an accelerometer. :(

~~~
nostrademons
I'd imagine they also do some geolocation, so it's two users who bumped at the
same time _and same place_. Dunno how accurate a location they can get, but
unless it's a really crowded mixer, this should probably enough to uniquely ID
people. It also suggests some interesting features, eg. the software could
record when & where you met somebody, and could suggest other people who were
present at the time.

~~~
blhack
That was my guess as well...geolocation, I mean.

A major problem, to me, would be that the GPS in your phone doesn't usually
work so well when it is buried deep in a hotel conference center...

I'm sure that the app devs thought of this stuff, I just like trying to
mentally work through it myself as well...

~~~
a-priori
I think the time stamp is more important for matching devices. In fact,
theoretically, with an accurate enough time stamp you wouldn't need a location
to match the devices virtually all the time.

Another idea I had would be to tell the users to knock the devices together
twice. That way, you would have another dimension for matching devices: the
interval between the knocks should be the same, and that doesn't depend on the
clocks being synchronized on the two devices.

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rgrieselhuber
Business cards are about more than data in many parts of the world. Japan, for
example.

~~~
dgallagher
You sparked my curiosity. What do they do in Japan with them?

~~~
rgrieselhuber
It's not so much what they do with them, although there is more ritual
associated with giving and receiving them (and they look aghast at Americans
who wing their own cards across a conference table).

Basically, they believe that a business card is an extension of the person and
should be treated with a great deal of respect. This does result in subtle
things like making sure to put their business card on a notebook or leather
holder in front of you during meetings (so it doesn't directly touch the
table).

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akshat
Somehow I think the twitter generation will overstep the business card by
miles.

The last time I was at a conference(in Bangalore), which is miles away from
the hustle bustle of Silicon valley, insted of exchanging business cards
people were just exchanging twitter ids.

I think this is cool to show to your friends, etc. But when it comes to
exchanging business contact, twitter has an upper hand.

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radley
I _beg_ all YC alumni to use Bump.

The last YC meet-up was great, but nobody had biz cards (I took pics with my
iPhone instead).

Prolly one of the funnest/coolest useful apps I've seen come through YC. I'd
love to see massive mainstream adoption.

~~~
prodigal_erik
Are YC alumni really the target audience? An iPhone with service costs about
20,000 ramen packets...

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a-priori
After reading this, I just ordered a batch of business cards. Is that telling?
:)

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RK
So why is the bump necessary, vs just both people turning the app on and being
in proximity to each other? Or is that just the gimmick?

~~~
dgallagher
Look at the FAQ: <http://www.bumptechnologies.com/faq.phtml>

Sounds like they're matching the timing and "type" or "intensity" of the bump
using the accelerometers. Both phones send this data to their cloud server,
the server is able to match the pair (unique timing of the bump, unique
intensity, etc...), and then it transfers the contact data.

~~~
donw
That makes sense; the odds of bumping at the same place, at the same time, and
with similar enough motion vectors _should_ be small enough to give
uniqueness.

That said, every phone I've ever owned in Japan has a little IR port, and you
can send your contact info across very easily, even between different
carriers.

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cmos
Ok, we've pointed out a lot of the flaws with a system like this. But what if
there were advantages beyond just 'exchanging data'?

One drawback to the business card is that it is very passive. I just cleaned
out piles of business cards and threw them away. However, a priceless one or
two were very handy. I wished I had kept track of them better.

What if, when I 'bump' someone, it also lists all the people we have in common
through linkedin and facebook? It could also tell me all the other people at
the function who I have previously 'bumped'. (or are 1 or 2 degrees from me)
Now I went from a basic 'hi how are you, what do you do' conversation to
bonding over a common associate.

I can only assume there is more to this than basic contact exchange
functionality. It's gotta have more of a pull that their working on for Bump
2.0. (points if they name the extra functionality 'grind')

(maybe there is a dating element to it as well?)

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flooha
The author thinks that a handshake is "an annoying relic of the past.", and
launching an app and bumping phones is somehow superior? Whatever. A handshake
can tell you a lot about a person and gives us a little, sometimes much
needed, human contact from people outside our normal circles.

I'm not dogging the app, just the author's assertion.

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froo
I remember seeing years ago (long before the handheld device took off)
researchers were working on a device that would swap business/contact
information digitally through a handshake. The device was contained in your
shoe.

While I like the idea of digital exchanges of information (the above idea
never really took off), I just don't think this is terribly practical,
especially the deep rooted customs, such as business cards and handshakes.

All the best of luck though, I'd sure as hell like to be proven wrong.

Now, if you could figure out a way to exchange information through a handshake
with the phone sitting in your pocket, you have a goldmine right there sirs.
I'm pretty sure you wouldn't even have to give it away.

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Tichy
Something like that is never going to fly. What if I meet somebody who doesn't
have an enabled phone? I'll still need to carry around the business card. So
why put in the extra effort for other systems?

For the first time I see a benefit in putting a QR code on my card, though -
maybe the "enabled" people could just scan the QR code and would not need to
bother with taking the card.

I thought QR codes would be superfluous because of OCR, but apparently the
technology is still not there yet?

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paul9290
Currently how big is your market here? How many ppl have an Internet centric
phone vs. a regular handset?

Are you looking 3 to 5 years into the future re: market potential?

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andrewljohnson
I <3 business cards. One of my weaknesses is buying expensive business cards.
And I even suspect that they have some impact on my dealings. All part of the
brand...

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sfphotoarts
might have been a better idea to build this for the Blackberry. Not that I'd
install it anyway. 15 seconds vs 1 second to exchange cards and I can do cards
in parallel. Imagine how silly you'd feel in an actual business setting
bumping iPhones with one another... A better idea would be to point the iPhone
at someone in a mtg and it identify them using some form of augmented reality.
we don't need tagging, there are much better ways.

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callmeed
How bout this for a business card service:

1\. I create my "virtual business card" online and upload 5 pictures of myself

2\. Someone meets me at a conference, takes my pic (in 5 secs), then uploads
it (via mobile app or web)

3\. Facial recognition confirms who I am and they get to download all my
information to their address book

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smikhanov
Do I have to bump (touch) someone's hand when doing cards exchange? What about
Asian market (millions of iPhone units are sold there), where business
etiquette is that you should hand your business card to someone while holding
it with both of your hands, and you should not touch the receiver?

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TrevorJ
He lost me as soon as he said that the handshake is outdated. I'm incredibly
wired into the digital world, but some things just shouldn't be 'digitized'.
We live in a physical world and our brains are built to deal with a physical
world. Everything else is a hack.

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buro9
Going after the BUSINESS card market with an IPHONE app?

Now, the Pre would be compelling, but the Blackberry is where this app should
live, and Windows Mobile. The latter 2 are all I see in the UK. The odd
iPhones I encounter are people's personal phones.

~~~
jlees
Aye, in the UK "real" businesspeople use Blackberries, us cool kids with
iPhones love to flash our Moo cards.

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bcl
If Apple would let the bluetooth built into the phone actually be USEFUL then
you could do this without any need for an intermediary.

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siong1987
Congratulations.

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mooted
Just another silly app. A whole company just to build this?

~~~
kirubakaran
I think it is bad to let the thought "Is it a big enough idea?" stop you from
building something. You don't know what doors building it will open.

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TweedHeads
Put together one jpg and some xml in one package, standardize it and share it
with everybody on the web, mobile, bluetooth, wireless, etc.

Kind of like a vcard on steroids.

Let everybody show it on their webpage, blog, etc.

Show it, share it, send it, shake it, transfer it.

