

Paypal Adds Innovative ‘Bump’ To Mobile Payment Suite - pg
http://www.mobileinc.co.uk/2010/03/paypal-adds-ridiculously-innovative-bump-to-mobile-payment-suite/

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devinj
I don't get it. I mean, sure, the technology is cool. They have some kind of
spatial tree with temporal information added to individual nodes so they can
detect nearby bumps. I find that somewhat interesting (but there are more
interesting problems abound).

But as an actual application, what? Maybe it's just because I don't have a
phone. I don't see how it's much easier than just scrolling through a contacts
list-- which, by the way, you can do _anywhere_ , not just when you're next to
the person-- or pulling out your wallet and giving the person the money as
cash (which is usually how I've done it / seen it done-- and where there has
been paypal involved, it's always been when we weren't next to each other). I
could _maybe_ see it being used as some kind of replacement for debit/credit
cards, which are annoying. Simply nodding your phone towards a kiosk/reader
would seem easier, even including the time it takes to start up the app and so
on (then again, there is a reason I have to enter my PIN-- however, I could do
this in line with the phone...). But, I can't imagine that ever happening
(magstripe readers won a long time ago). What's so great about this?

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aero142
One advantage is that I don't have to have your contact information, and I
don't have to type out your email address.

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devinj
So then have the "bump" action exchange contact information. Why limit it to
something that has been solved for centuries? Transferring money to people you
don't know is traditionally done with cash. Transferring contact information
is generally more painful.

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jamiequint
It does, that is the first/primary function of the app. This is just talking
about a PayPal implementation of their API.

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jmintz
Shameless plug: if you think this sounds interesting, we are hiring:
<http://bu.mp/jobs>. Feel free to email me (jake at bu.mp) if you have
questions or just want to learn more. :)

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qeorge
This reminds me of the original PayPal idea (paying a friend via Palm Pilot in
person).

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CWuestefeld
I liked that feature. My coworkers and I would use it to settle up with each
other when we went out for lunch. I never knew why they discontinued it.

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qeorge
Max Levchin talks about this in jl's _Founders At Work_. They made the web app
mostly as a place to offer the Palm Pilot app for download, but it took off
much to everyone's surprise.

IIRC, when they finally abandoned the Palm Pilot app it had 12k active users
vs. millions using the web app. So as much as the Palm Pilot app was their
baby, it was an easy decision.

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wallflower
My initial impression of Bump is that it was a silly idea. Like what if you
damage your phone. However, the secret and success of Bump is that it makes a
boring transaction a little more fun. Bring back a little human interaction.
Make the people using it look cool or uncool (depending on the audience) - but
regardless make people pay a little more attention to the people bumping.
Everytime, I see a public Bump, I get amused.

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natrius
If you bump in the manner depicted in the Bump logo, you won't damage your
phone.

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ganjianwei
"When two people with the app bump phones, the sensor readings are sent to the
Paypal servers where the algorithm listens to bumps happening all over the
world and matches the two phones that felt the same movement."

Correct me if I'm wrong but if they're using Bump's API, aren't the Bump
servers the ones doing the algorithmic matching and not the Paypal servers?

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jmintz
Correct, the Bump servers are doing the matching.

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jakehow
All of the press implies that this lets you make payments by bumping phones.
If you have actually used the application, you will see that all it does is
send the person's email address to you.

Because Bump is not deterministic(ie, you could get a random person's contact
info if you are say in an auditorium at SXSW), you still have to confirm that
this is the contact you want. Overall, it probably takes more time than just
typing the email in, and then you have to go through the normal payment flow
anyway. There would be value if it transfered the entire vcard to your address
book at the same time since this might be a lot of info.

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thwarted
Ridiculously innovative? Hasn't Bump Technologies offered something similar
for nearly a year?

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Tuna-Fish
I think paypal bought it from them.

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jmintz
PayPal is licensing the technology from us. Anyone can by do the same at
<http://bu.mp/api>. For most people it is free to license.

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redorb
<http://bu.mp/apideveloper.html>

is giving me a 500 internal error; its not a nice break either. spewing some
errors instead of a generic page.

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jamwt
Thanks for the heads-up. We're just re-deploying (today) some of our website
on a new platform, and still working out the kinks.

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djb_hackernews
I've never used bump, but what happens if I am bumping in close proximity to
two other phones bumping?

Anyone ever play with distance thresholds? How close do you actually have to
be when you "bump" for it to make a match?

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njharman
Read the article.

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djb_hackernews
I did read the article. Was looking for real world experimentation or maybe a
comment from people at Bump. Bumps don't need to happen phone-to-phone, and
geolocation data isn't all that accurate.

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jakehow
I saw multiple Bump interactions in highly dense technophile populations at
SXSW where two people got a random contact when they bumped.

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lincolnq
Awesome! Paypal's "original" (Confinity) business was to allow you to "beam"
payments between mobile devices. This closes the loop nicely.

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please
why not just use bluetooth?

