Bump Technologies (YC S09): The Quest To Destroy The Business Card | Hacker News Reader

Bump Technologies (YC S09): The Quest To Destroy The Business Card

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I lost my iPhone, so I can't use this, so here's my question: if I bump phones with someone, does their information go into my Address Book?

You have to earn your way into my Address Book on my phone by getting drunk with me or being related by blood (seriously, no exceptions - same as with Facebook).

Business card hate is way overblown; there's a nice natural segregation and there's enough room to write notes for follow-ups. I mean, business cards are a solution to the problem of exchanging information amongst casual acquaintences; they're not a problem themselves. I think this is where "business card replacements" (and we've had them since the Palm Pilot days) fail.

Yes, contacts are added to the iPhone's address book. Future versions of Bump will let you easily add a note after receiving a contact and show you the location of where you met someone.

You have to earn your way into my Address Book on my phone by getting drunk with me or being related by blood (seriously, no exceptions - same as with Facebook).

You might see your life enriched a whole lot IF you just removed that law of yours. I would go a step further and say, dedicate an afternoon a month just to go through your cell phone contacts and say hell to everyone you don't remember speaking to recently.

No man is an island, unless he is surrounded by the vomit of his drinking buddies and cousins ;-)

Good app, but I doubt it'll gain traction in the business world. The business cards are too ingrained into our society.

Its like the don't shake hands techcrunch post, I'm not going to stop shaking hands, just because techcrunch thinks its an outdated method of greeting people.

Biz cards are a pain in the butt:

1) You've got to design and pay to print them. If titles or contact info changes, that's a re-print. The cost matters a lot particularly to the SoHo market.

2) You've got to carry them around with you everywhere to hand out. Usually this is in a metal case that's kinda cumbersome in a pocket shared with an iPhone/BlackBerry already.

3) When someone hands you one, you've gotta stick it in your pocket and not lose it.

4) After you bring them to your office, you need to file them somehow (scan them, manually enter them into Outlook/whatever).

I've seen people at hedge funds buy expensive scanners which plug into Outlook and let you scan this stuff in. It does OCR on the cards and auto-creates contacts for you. The scanners are around $200/each, plug into your desktop, and are a tad annoying to install and config. The cards get tossed into the trash the moment it's in Outlook.

If you don't buy a scanner for every employee, that's time wasted while they type said card info into Outlook.

While something like this won't "kill" business cards in the business world, it'll offer a nice alternative.

Here's an idea for an iPhone App that'll let someone with an iPhone do-away with biz cards all together: A scanner app using the iPhone camera. Take a snapshot* of someone's biz card, OCR it, and bam, it's in your contacts. Easier said than done, of course. But it eliminates steps 3 and 4 above, making your life easier when dealing with "legacy" business cards. :)

*Yeah, yeah, we all know how good the iPhone camera is at close-ups. Maybe the next revision? ;)

something like this is hardly an alternative, since it requires everyone to own the iphone(hardly a cheap toy) and the app.

That's true, and an excellent point.

If you go back to the days when Palm Pilots were the rage, you could beam your business card over the IR port on them. People still used biz cards, but two people who had a Palm didn't.

I'm probably a bit bias as I live in a city (Boston) that's littered with iPhones. Lots of people have them, including my friends. There is a mini-technology gap between people who have them and those who don't. If you're in the "iPhone crowd" something like this seems really cool. Otherwise, meh.

If this suddenly worked on every cell phone in the world tomorrow, not just iPhone's, you'd probably have a lot more people interested in it.

the video shows it takes about 15 seconds to launch the app, tap the button, and exchange data. now add in time to pull your phone out and unlock it (possibly with a pin). i just timed myself and it took 10 seconds to take the phone out of my pocket, slide the unlock bar, put in my pin, push the home button to get out of the last app i was in, and scroll to the home screen of apps.

so 25 seconds may not seem like a long time, but realistically, standing in front of someone for 25 seconds doing nothing is pretty awkward. really, try it. go up to someone and stand there counting to 25 in your head. now consider doing that in front of someone you don't really know (otherwise why would you be exchanging information?)

now consider pulling a business card out of that same pocket and handing it to the person. they can say thanks and put it in their pocket without even looking at it, then process it later.

Thanks for that, it didn't even occur to me. :) Yeah, the social awkwardness factor kinda blows it in some instances, doesn't it?

If you could run it as a background service on the iPhone (which you can't without jailbreak), you could cut 15 seconds off that time.

Maybe given the current technical limitations it'll work better in some social settings than others. Informal ones where time isn't pressed, like hanging out with a group of people. Or at a convention. If you're sitting in a booth you could have an iPhone sitting on the table with the app open and ready to go. A passer-by might want to shoot you an email later, so they pull out their iPhone, bump yours, and away they go...

I guess thinking about it more it probably works in some situations better than others. It's niched though, and that's the stuff of entrepreneurial gold. ;)

I don't think it would be socially awkward, because the 2 people involved are not just standing around doing nothing for the 25 seconds; they are both busy tapping their phones.

You'll probably be able to cut that time down if you don't use a pin code (I don't), and if you put the app in the bottom row of apps.

Business cards are a pain if you ever want to use the information. Most people don't type them up so if you ever need the information you have to scramble to find the card so you can call/email the person. Once you factor in the time it takes to store the information on a business card Bump is more competitive time wise (but of course I am biased).

At most of the business mixers that I've gone to people later add the contacts to LinkedIn, at which point they can grab a vCard if they need to import it elsewhere. It might be worth looking into the LinkedIn API to see if you can try to get a similar workflow with Bump.

Re your idea: I believe Evernote.com has that capability.

Yep, and you can get a case (Clarifi by Griffin) that noticeably improves the inbuilt camera to make this really easy.

Great thoughtful comments. I have had a similar experience with business cards. I didn't always have them when I wanted them (hated carrying them everywhere when I wasn't working) and the ones I got piled up uselessly on my desk (neither my admin or card scanner could reliably add contacts to Outlook without typos). Bump may not be for everyone right now, but we will keep trying to change that by adding features that business cards can't compete with and porting to other platforms.

General-purpose OCR (the task to properly scan, recognize and categorize information on the card) isn't a solved problem. I like the idea of placing QR Code (or Beetag for more aesthetics) on the card for machine processing. There are QR Code readers for every reasonable mobile phone in the world.

Could you make the process any more complicated? I hear there's this thing called Bluetooth and all you have to do is activate it and zap the phone directly with it. Why communicate with the "cloud" at all?

I think it would be interesting to use Bluetooth to automatically exchange business cards with nearby people (e.g., at a conference) to determine whom you might want to talk to.

Bluetooth is surprisingly difficult to get working between different phones. When phones actually do recognize each other it takes a long time to pair. Once pairing is completed (even between iPhones this takes ~45 when it works) transfers speeds are fast. Communicating with our server in the cloud is a compromise, but it eliminates the cross-platform compatability and pairing problems of Bluetooth.

As someone else noted, you're still waiting around for ~25 seconds with Bump. That's an incremental improvement and users may be slightly more forgiving of the time.

Have you looked into Bonjour?

How well does this scale?

They sortof glossed over the ninjitsu that is being used to link the two "bumps" together. My guess is that (since internet access is required), it syncs a clock within the bump application to the bump server, then looks for phones that were "bumped" at the same time.

I'm sure I'm wrong, and would love to hear of other ways that this is happening.

If I'm not, how does this scale up to the millions or hundreds of millions of users that it would require to actually replace the business card (which is what it sounds like it wants to do).

Even if it isn't at millions, how well does it function at events where lots and lots of people are "bumping" (clever name, I have already verbed it)?

Finally...and this is what would--to me--kill it: the blackberry does not have an accelerometer. :(

I'd imagine they also do some geolocation, so it's two users who bumped at the same time and same place. Dunno how accurate a location they can get, but unless it's a really crowded mixer, this should probably enough to uniquely ID people. It also suggests some interesting features, eg. the software could record when & where you met somebody, and could suggest other people who were present at the time.

That was my guess as well...geolocation, I mean.

A major problem, to me, would be that the GPS in your phone doesn't usually work so well when it is buried deep in a hotel conference center...

I'm sure that the app devs thought of this stuff, I just like trying to mentally work through it myself as well...

I think the time stamp is more important for matching devices. In fact, theoretically, with an accurate enough time stamp you wouldn't need a location to match the devices virtually all the time.

Another idea I had would be to tell the users to knock the devices together twice. That way, you would have another dimension for matching devices: the interval between the knocks should be the same, and that doesn't depend on the clocks being synchronized on the two devices.

Business cards are about more than data in many parts of the world. Japan, for example.

You sparked my curiosity. What do they do in Japan with them?

When I was at a conference in Tokyo, a lot of people had 2D bar codes on theirs that encoded their contact info.

It's not so much what they do with them, although there is more ritual associated with giving and receiving them (and they look aghast at Americans who wing their own cards across a conference table).

Basically, they believe that a business card is an extension of the person and should be treated with a great deal of respect. This does result in subtle things like making sure to put their business card on a notebook or leather holder in front of you during meetings (so it doesn't directly touch the table).

I guess someone has to mention the scene from American Psycho:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoIvd3zzu4Y

Somehow I think the twitter generation will overstep the business card by miles.

The last time I was at a conference(in Bangalore), which is miles away from the hustle bustle of Silicon valley, insted of exchanging business cards people were just exchanging twitter ids.

I think this is cool to show to your friends, etc. But when it comes to exchanging business contact, twitter has an upper hand.

I beg all YC alumni to use Bump.

The last YC meet-up was great, but nobody had biz cards (I took pics with my iPhone instead).

Prolly one of the funnest/coolest useful apps I've seen come through YC. I'd love to see massive mainstream adoption.

Are YC alumni really the target audience? An iPhone with service costs about 20,000 ramen packets...

After reading this, I just ordered a batch of business cards. Is that telling? :)

So why is the bump necessary, vs just both people turning the app on and being in proximity to each other? Or is that just the gimmick?

Look at the FAQ: http://www.bumptechnologies.com/faq.phtml

Sounds like they're matching the timing and "type" or "intensity" of the bump using the accelerometers. Both phones send this data to their cloud server, the server is able to match the pair (unique timing of the bump, unique intensity, etc...), and then it transfers the contact data.

That makes sense; the odds of bumping at the same place, at the same time, and with similar enough motion vectors should be small enough to give uniqueness.

That said, every phone I've ever owned in Japan has a little IR port, and you can send your contact info across very easily, even between different carriers.

Ok, we've pointed out a lot of the flaws with a system like this. But what if there were advantages beyond just 'exchanging data'?

One drawback to the business card is that it is very passive. I just cleaned out piles of business cards and threw them away. However, a priceless one or two were very handy. I wished I had kept track of them better.

What if, when I 'bump' someone, it also lists all the people we have in common through linkedin and facebook? It could also tell me all the other people at the function who I have previously 'bumped'. (or are 1 or 2 degrees from me) Now I went from a basic 'hi how are you, what do you do' conversation to bonding over a common associate.

I can only assume there is more to this than basic contact exchange functionality. It's gotta have more of a pull that their working on for Bump 2.0. (points if they name the extra functionality 'grind')

(maybe there is a dating element to it as well?)

The author thinks that a handshake is "an annoying relic of the past.", and launching an app and bumping phones is somehow superior? Whatever. A handshake can tell you a lot about a person and gives us a little, sometimes much needed, human contact from people outside our normal circles.

I'm not dogging the app, just the author's assertion.

I remember seeing years ago (long before the handheld device took off) researchers were working on a device that would swap business/contact information digitally through a handshake. The device was contained in your shoe.

While I like the idea of digital exchanges of information (the above idea never really took off), I just don't think this is terribly practical, especially the deep rooted customs, such as business cards and handshakes.

All the best of luck though, I'd sure as hell like to be proven wrong.

Now, if you could figure out a way to exchange information through a handshake with the phone sitting in your pocket, you have a goldmine right there sirs. I'm pretty sure you wouldn't even have to give it away.

Something like that is never going to fly. What if I meet somebody who doesn't have an enabled phone? I'll still need to carry around the business card. So why put in the extra effort for other systems?

For the first time I see a benefit in putting a QR code on my card, though - maybe the "enabled" people could just scan the QR code and would not need to bother with taking the card.

I thought QR codes would be superfluous because of OCR, but apparently the technology is still not there yet?

Currently how big is your market here? How many ppl have an Internet centric phone vs. a regular handset?

Are you looking 3 to 5 years into the future re: market potential?

I <3 business cards. One of my weaknesses is buying expensive business cards. And I even suspect that they have some impact on my dealings. All part of the brand...

might have been a better idea to build this for the Blackberry. Not that I'd install it anyway. 15 seconds vs 1 second to exchange cards and I can do cards in parallel. Imagine how silly you'd feel in an actual business setting bumping iPhones with one another... A better idea would be to point the iPhone at someone in a mtg and it identify them using some form of augmented reality. we don't need tagging, there are much better ways.

How bout this for a business card service:

1. I create my "virtual business card" online and upload 5 pictures of myself

2. Someone meets me at a conference, takes my pic (in 5 secs), then uploads it (via mobile app or web)

3. Facial recognition confirms who I am and they get to download all my information to their address book

Do I have to bump (touch) someone's hand when doing cards exchange? What about Asian market (millions of iPhone units are sold there), where business etiquette is that you should hand your business card to someone while holding it with both of your hands, and you should not touch the receiver?

He lost me as soon as he said that the handshake is outdated. I'm incredibly wired into the digital world, but some things just shouldn't be 'digitized'. We live in a physical world and our brains are built to deal with a physical world. Everything else is a hack.

Going after the BUSINESS card market with an IPHONE app?

Now, the Pre would be compelling, but the Blackberry is where this app should live, and Windows Mobile. The latter 2 are all I see in the UK. The odd iPhones I encounter are people's personal phones.

Aye, in the UK "real" businesspeople use Blackberries, us cool kids with iPhones love to flash our Moo cards.

If Apple would let the bluetooth built into the phone actually be USEFUL then you could do this without any need for an intermediary.

Congratulations.

Just another silly app. A whole company just to build this?

I think it is bad to let the thought "Is it a big enough idea?" stop you from building something. You don't know what doors building it will open.

Put together one jpg and some xml in one package, standardize it and share it with everybody on the web, mobile, bluetooth, wireless, etc.

Kind of like a vcard on steroids.

Let everybody show it on their webpage, blog, etc.

Show it, share it, send it, shake it, transfer it.

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