Bump (YC S09) has been acquired by Google
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blog.bu.mp
1) It's a technology, not a feature. Many companies, mostly Android handset makers but also Blackberry and Nokia, have included it in their devices as "yet another selling point". It was included not as a way to make a better device or experience for customers, but as a gimmick for upselling handsets.
2) It's insecure. Holy hell, Batman. Just spend a couple minutes reading through the security section of the NFC Wikipedia entry. It's insanely easy to read transactions remotely, modify data, and jam signals. Even more, there is no hint of security built into the technology. None. No RF signal modification detection, no encryption.
3) Unreliable. While it sounds like a good idea on paper, for the most part it just doesn't work very well in practice. There's too many subpar implementations in too many devices. Just because you have a good one in your handset doesn't help when most of the limited ones available in public are cheap.
There's a damn good reason Apple hasn't included NFC. It's broken. They definitely put out crappy products from time to time (don't forget Ping, iPod socks, Maps, Siri, MobileMe, and about 300 variations of the Mac before Jobs came back). But NFC hasn't proven to be something useful or valuable. They won't include it. Perhaps something like it in the future, but never NFC in its current form.
I think the reason it hasn't caught on here is because municipalities, malls, theme parks, etc., haven't embraced the technology, so there's no need for it to be in our phones.
The top search results for "nfc asia" and "nfc hong kong" mainly return press releases and news articles about how NFC is being rolled out. In fact, most of the ones I found are as recent as July and August.
There was one older story from April 2011 talking about "hundreds of field trials" but no follow-on detail.
I'm not doubting that certain markets in major Asian cities have seen NFC rollouts. But I question a) the scale and b) the public reception. Indeed, since smart phones are still catching on in major markets in many Asian markets I am doubtful of how wide-spread NFC adoption actually can be.
I'd love to see some specific stories that refute my point of view.
Train stations in mainland China use something similar, though I'm basing this only my experience with one city, but a big one at that (Guangzhou).
Part of the reason why you aren't finding more accounts of successful NFC rollouts in Asia might be because you aren't searching in the local languages.
Purely anecdotal, granted, but you asked for stories.
(Personally, I use an iPhone with a Pasmo NFC card duct-taped to the back of it.)
But all kinds of phones have NFC and can be used for trains and buying stuff.
The strength of phone NFC seems to be that it's basically a "smart card on your phone," and smart cards as a payment method are extremely common in places like Tokyo, Hong Kong, etc., largely driven by their ubiquity in the form of mass-transit cards (Suica, Pasmo, Octopus, etc).
Far more people have smart cards than have smartphones in these places, and so offering smart-card-compatible NFC functionality on phones seems a no-brainer.
The result of this is that NFC-on-your-phone has worked for ages in Japan, on all types of phone ("smart" and otherwise, except the iphone), and as it uses a widespread existing infrastructure, there's no real issue with availability.
In other words, NFC is not something that's dependent on smartphone popularity for success; rather smartphones with NFC are simply trying to take advantage of an existing successful system to become more popular.
As for the question "do people use it?" I can't refer you to any "stories" but I can say that I personally see lots of people paying for stuff with their phone.... [The main issue with smartphones seems to be that the iphone doesn't support NFC, and lots of people have iphones...]
MIFARE DESFire comes to mind as one of the more popular cards with encryption, though I do recall there's others as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIFARE#MIFARE_DESFire
And as for it being unreliable: [citation needed]. I've never had problems sending data to another NFC-enabled device. The only time I've ever had it not work was back when phones with non-NXP chipsets first started to appear on the market, and some folks were still selling standalone tags that used NXP's older proprietary format (MIFARE Classic) rather than the standardized format (NFC Forum). That's rarely a problem these days.
The lower level stuff and NDEF format is well standardized. The higher level operations are not nearly as well standardised right now, even more so when you're dealing with large files, which will require a handoff to Bluetooth or WiFi Direct.
In NFC's defense, it's only recently (4.2, Jelly Bean) that Android even supported transferring large files via Bluetooth handoff, so hopefully that stuff will improve with time.
I've personally never had it work. I tried twice with different two phones (Motorola and Samsung) and while it did recognize it was supposed to do something NFC-esque, the data never transferred. At that point I gave up and just swapped SD-cards and manually copied the data over.
Just my experience but I'm not interested in trying again when there are other methods that I know will transfer data guaranteed to work.
On the flip side, adding the extra hardware to a tag to support encryption has a non-trivial cost. (NFC tags are limited by both storage space and power.) If you're doing mass production of tags, that cost adds up very quickly.
For gaming - imagine a game console with mix-and-match one-handed controllers. Trackballs, joysticks, pointers, keyboards, mice, etc. Bump them together to tell the console "I'm using the whamblefloog with the xorchball" so it can tie each disparate controller to the concept of a two-handed player.
[1] http://www.interac.ca/en/interac-flash/interac-flash-for-con...
And vending machines, and convenience stores, etc.
I would be willing to bet, in the eternal rotation of the IT wheel, that the next revolution will be something very much like IRDA in your google glass glasses.
Of course it'll be hampered by incompatibility, relatively low uptake, unreliable software, insecurity, probably only supported by certain platforms, and probably an awful and difficult to use UI, so it'll die out. To be replaced by more or less identical short range RF "solution" (and guess how that will turn out?)
There's no reason short range IR or RF can't work at the hardware level. No reason a unified, generic, stable standard can't exist. Other than the whole, lack of need thing.
Look how well bluetooth and wifi work using basically the same technology... because they solved actual problems.
For a technology that's supposed to make sharing data so quick and easy, it seems like a really bad sign that I have not been able to make it work even once, despite sitting there fiddling with it for probably 20 minutes. It's like someone looked at the extremely painful and ill-defined bluetooth pairing user experience and said, "yeah, that's a good starting point, but let's make it a little more frustrating."
Apple and the US market aren't the entire universe. NFC is already used in other countries for secure communication (payments, ID, etc), but that's not even one of the most interesting aspects of it.
I will stick to Bump, since that's the subject of the topic: when I checked a couple of years ago, their way of connecting two devices was primitive and rather insecure, it was essentially a heuristic that used several parameters to guess which two users "bumped". NFC would have solved the problem perfectly, with no network communication needed and 100% user-to-user match rate.
They (were?) using a patented algorithm working on accelerometer signals to figure out which devices were being "bumped" together server-side.
Are iPod Socks really considered a failed product?
Since the start they've had interesting technology (though of the kind that looks easier to implement than it really is) but, in my opinion at least, never found a killer app for it. I remember when they had that webpage where you would hit the space bar with your phone and that would be enough to create the connection. That was really cool, but it felt like a "cool trick" rather than something I ended up using.
edit: I didn't want to come off as negative and I'm sorry if it reads this way. Their solutions are very innovative and inventive, and really feel magical. I just wish it had caught on more… Hopefully Google is planning on using the technology in many places. It would make sense of course for it to be part of the core of Android, but the syncing between mobile and desktop could be very useful as well.
I met some Bump folk a year ago. The company had a lot of employees and still wasn't making any money.
They basically burnt all their investors money. Calling this an acquisition is bending the truth.
Umm. Google bought them - that's an acquisition no matter if they are making money or not (unless "acquisition" has been redefined somehow)
Someone glancing at the headline would assume this was a successful exist for a YCombinator backed company.
However, perhaps any remaining cash was returned to the original investors, less costs of liquidation, and any assets were "sold" to Google for $1 with some of the development team moving to Google as temporary contractors or probationary hires, rather than immediate permanent hires.
It seems that investors are now scared of failing, losing money and the impact on reputation, so they want to preserve their mythical image as Titans of Silicon Valley (much like investment bankers believed they were Masters of the Universe) for as long as possible. Thus they come up with dubious acquisitions, acquihires and mask strategic failure as pivoting.
read, Google will likely be shutting down our services within the next 6 months.
I don't know the Bump team, but I respect the effort and the outcome.
A few years ago a bunch of users in an BBS were playing with the app by bumping alone and see who the algorithm would pick as a match in their town. I guess it got better, but at that time you had something like a one in five chance to get a match in downtown areas.
Dunno if that was actually the case though.
http://www.google.com/patents/US20110191823
Looks like they took out some patents on fixed buttons as well.
http://www.google.com/search?tbo=p&tbm=pts&hl=en&q=inassigne...
But then, you go on to speculate not just that it's probably not technically difficult, just "clever", and then go even further to speculate that it's probably "not exactly a technology that seems worth acquiring." Are you asking questions in good faith or are you making claims? What you wrote here seems less a genuine question and more a post to downplay bump's work and their acquisition as worthy.
I can go on, but if you can't imagine it being difficult, then your imagination needs work!
I think the hard part of their patented algorithm would be to use data from the accelerometer - basically the only thing that can be 'trusted' - to match bumps up through the unique bumping signature/characteristics. Actually - since it's patented it should be public record, so we could go look it up.
Now what is note-worthy here is that the signatures wouldn't be "identical". They may not even be opposite as i think the idea is to bump your HANDS while holding them, so the hands may distort the vibrations. So the fact that they actually managed it to WORK is astounding.
Here is a view of the web interface that I would use to demo/test the API: http://i.imgur.com/tQA35U8.png
I still can't figure out a product for the thing, but if you have an idea, hit me up :)
The site needs a big UI and workflow revamp (already worked out on paper) and won't scale right now (it just uses a single instance of Meteor and a MongoDB database and doesn't handle Internet-scale abuse.)
You can see the current iteration at http://www.near.im/.
Yeah, the UI is ugly and overly complicated right now. It is really more of a technical demo and a project for me to experiment with Meteor on at this point (it has zero active users.)
I am presently requiring a login to post to (in theory) prevent flooding it with spam. The person who is receiving the message does not need to log in. I have thought about removing the Facebook login requirement either for now (when there aren't many users) or permanently (need to have a way to prevent spam.)
If was already on your phone I could see users adopting it for things like contacts & photo exchange.
Please note, I'm not saying they are wrong for being acquired by Google. Just saying that as of right now, building on the Bump platform just got a lot more unsure.
The biggest problem with NFC, etc... it's still significantly faster to swipe a credit card! Getting my phone out, unlocking it with a code, making sure the screen stays on while I stand in line (for e.g. Starbucks). This future is for the birds.
What kind of hardware is more prevalent, graphical displays and cameras, or NFC hardware?
Anything you can do with NFC you can do easier (easier, not easily...) with QR codes.
NFC hardware is slightly more vandalism resistant than displays and cams. But bulletproof displays and cams are pretty tough, and if you're going to have to put up a cam to protect the NFC hardware, may as well go all QR code.
Half a time, it either doesn't work, or I've seen cases a store person not knowing how to interpret the fact that payment was accepted or not.
Rather than going through this, it's just easier to just take out the card and use that instead. Another thing about those NFC methods, considering they are relatively new technology, is that they are not seeing something tangible and it apparently makes a store person bit nervous when it doesn't work. I often observed signs of hostility, perhaps, they feel like I'm trying to do something nasty, because they just don't know what that's all about.
[0] http://likeus.co
Bump is/was "neat". I downloaded the app the instant I heard about it, 4 years ago? In all that time I never "bumped" with another person. I exchange about 700 business cards per year. For the first 18 months, and then a couple of random times later, I'd ask people "do you have Bump?", met with nothing but odd stares. NOBODY every asked me or suggested we us an app to exchange contact info.
I love the idea, but it just doesn't seem to have taken off. Not to mention that (IMO) this was a little more of a "feature" than a "product".
Don't get me wrong, they built something cool, gots lots of users and presumably lots of active users, and managed to get acquired by Google. I have tons of respect for the team, but I don't think you can draw any conclusions from this acquisition as it relates to NFC or anything else.