Perhaps I'm old fashioned, but what's wrong with using Bluetooth? The last thing I want to do with a $600 phone is smack it into somebody else's $600 phone just to transfer some pictures.
Compare to: lightly tap your phones together.
Bump your phones together. Bump them together again. Wait for both to connect to the central Bump server, potentially failing to do so. Approve the transfer. Accept the transfer.
Now, lets assume the same amount of development effort goes into writing a proper interface for Bluetooth transfers. It could be something like:
Put two phones near each other. Drag an image/contact/money onto the "Bob's Phone" on my screen. Bob drags it from his inbox to wherever he wants it.
That seems easier to me: it doesn't involve third parties[2], complex bump-matching heuristics, or physical contact.
[1] http://bu.mp/faq
[2] Even if Bump's servers have 100% uptime, how do you know that the local cell towers will have similar records? What if you're in San Francisco or New York, which have notoriously poor iPhone reception?
I am sure Bump uses more than mere cell phone reception, for iPod Touch is supported, which means wifi must/can be involved as well.
In a perfect world, yes, Bluetooth would do what it's meant to do, but in the real world people like to bump into each other :-)
So this means that you have to send your data through their central servers. Yes, it is encrypted, etc. but I would feel much safer if it were encrypted and sent locally instead.
Also I am sure as it gets popular there will be issues with timing, such as different people bumping at the same time, or the bumps being mistimed, due to differences in the way the wireless networks of two different providers time stamp the various notifications.
So it seems that while the act of bumping may give an impression of security (i.e., that you know for sure who you are sending your data to), this impression is illusory which means you will have to authenticate the recipient anyways, so you might as well use bluetooth.
And as somebody else noted if they devoted the same efforts to bluetooth, I am sure they could make their app just as nice. And they can also use bumping to initiate bluetooth transfer too.
It seems that they are eerily insistent on transferring the data through their servers.
I think there are some folks at the MIT Media Lab who were experimenting with using touch as a way to establish relationships between devices (e.g., you touch a light-switch panel to a lamp, then stick it anywhere on the wall, and that switch will control the lamp it was bound to), but obviously current cellphone technology doesn’t support that.
The alternative to mutual authentication is to have a trusted third party, and that’s what the Bump server provides. Using the server to create the illusion that information has passed from phone to phone by osmosis is, IMHO, a neat hack.
Judging from their job board, it's because they plan to mine the data.
"At Bump we have a diverse collection of data sets: network performance, user behavior, social network data, and many types of handset data [...]"
The official recommended bumping techniques is hold phones, and bump hands. Like a fist bump. That eliminates the risk of damaging your phone and actually works better.
The long-term goal is to bump more than contacts and pictures. For instance you can bump money using the new PayPal app on iPhone.
Interesting -- could you elaborate more on this? I've never had a problem getting two Bluetooth devices to communicate. If my old laptop, older cell phone, and modern headset can all interoperate easily, I don't see why two months-old phones from the world's leading technology companies won't work together.
Uh, on Android? False:
http://developer.android.com/reference/android/bluetooth/Blu...
As opposed to GPS?