Bumptop acquired by Google

(could also an IP Acquisition)

The videos looked amazing, but in practice it's just a mess.

On the other hand, I thought that a side-effect of 20 years of acclimatizing to the industry-standard GUI might be difficulty switching to such a strange, physics-based 3D interface. It may be another issue of learning curve vs. post-learning benefit. I didn't give it enough time to really tell.

Same experience here, but I thought it had great potential - it was just limited by in-the-box thinking (literally, in fact). Not very good for a mouse/pen combo...but I can easily imagine some evolution of it on my phone. Android already presents picture galleries in a 'pile of photos' fashion, and while there's a limit amount of space on the phone for throwing things about, some tablet device could certainly benefit from a shuffly physics metaphor.

Agreed. It took me no more than a minute after installing to realize there was no use for this.

I'm not buying into 3D interfaces represented on a 2D screen. I don't believe 3D interfaces will succeed until they can be holographically projected around me a la District 9.

theres also http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0ODskdEPnQ and you can still download it for the next week at http://eol.bumptop.com/download.php

In that light, the TED presentation from a couple of years ago is also interesting: http://www.ted.com/talks/anand_agarawala_demos_his_bumptop_d...

At least it seemed very entertaining to the TED crowd, they're mostly laughing.

Bumptop on an Android tablet would be sweet.

Well, the product has been out just over/under a year, If I'd paid for a digital product and less than a year later I'm told that I've got just a week to download it forever and there will be no further updates, I'd be pretty pissed.

Then to find out something I paid (even just last week) for was then given free to everyone else..

I agree how much they paid is important in evaluating the purchase (the less they paid, the more justifiable it'd be to buy it just for some talent and in the off chance some of the ideas/tech/IP turned out to be useful). But I doubt it's anything as low as $200k, because they had VC funding of a few million, and presumably the VCs wouldn't sign off on selling for a loss. This article estimates $40m, though they may have just pulled that number out of thin air: http://thenextweb.com/google/2010/05/02/google-purchases-bum...

The download is really slow right now, does anyone have an alternate download location?

This is similar to what happened when Apple bought Coverflow.

Probably more likely aspects of it are headed to Chrome OS. Recalling the demos, I didn't see anything applicable to wee screens like phones.

I think its been shown before that Google (and others) often buy for the talent as much as the product.