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Comment by marcusf | Hacker News Reader

This just very cool in a very nerdy sort of way. I kinda wish it was less gimmicky, on the other hand I assume bump uses the time stamps of the shake and the key down to figure out which two devices are trying to talk. I wonder what the threshold for collision is?

Anyway, very cool and I could actually see a use for this, sending photos of whiteboards to colleagues that don't run Mac/have an iPhone. Would have to compete with email/dropbox for ease of use, but it does seem very simple on the receiving end, just surfing to a web page.

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Bump is known for their ingenious methods of relating lots of data to figure out which two phones were being bumped at the same time (there's a really cool answer on Quora about how they do it). I would assume this is their tech team figuring out how to apply the same techniques across two devices (browser/pc -> phone). I bet there is some really cool stuff at play here.

Is this it?

http://www.quora.com/How-does-Bump-work

I think that may be the one I read.

This is exactly why it feels so sexy. I took some courses in sensor fusion at university, and this is a very cool distributed application. Being able to create reliable "Bump-distance" vectors given all the variance with a distributed clock (though they seem to push the clock to the client in the browser), and with the position given by the browser etc. Very cool.

It's also using HTML5 browser location to narrow that tap down to a fairly small area. Pretty neat idea.

Yeah, that's true. I thought I wrote that as well but seems I erased it :) From experience, the accuracy on my browser location can be quite low, but I guess if you have (x,y,t) on both devices and a relatively large distance in the vector between bumpers it really doesn't matter.

I didn't approve the request for browser location, and it still worked flawlessly.

How do you know what web page you are supposed to "surf to"?

I was thinking in the case I'm standing next to him and just want to give him the file (I just photographed a whiteboard, for example). There's a ton of different, valid ways to send that file, but this is certainly one.

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