Bump!

Bump!: "

One of the nice things about this job is that I’m meeting lots of interesting
startups who are doing mobile apps. My fave so far is
Bump.

Bump World Headquarters

The idea is simple: I bump your phone with mine, and the result
is that I transfer something to you; say, a phone number, or a picture, or, of
course,
money.

A good place to start getting the picture would be their
FAQ.
This is the kind of technology I like; a simple effect, instantly
understandable, that requires rocket science under the
covers to pull off.

Ah, that startup ambience. You’ll note that I erased the
whiteboards, but I can reveal that one of them contained scraps of what
appeared to be [gasp!] Haskell code.

Bump and Android

There’s good news and bad news. The good news is that they’re running on
Android (very nicely) and shipping an Android API. You can bump an iPhone and
an Android together and it Just Works, no problemo.

In fact, there are a couple of things they can do in Android that are
harder on other platforms; for example, because of the Android
Intent
feature, you can register Bump to, for example, share pictures.

Of course, nothing’s perfect. The Bump guys had run
across a couple of issues which were causing them extra work at release time,
and really shouldn’t have.
So I visited them to look at the source code so we can figure out how to set
things up so that particular bug doesn’t bite anyone else.

Practical compatibility testing at the Bump World
HeadQuarters.

Any other startups reading this, I’d be happy to get pitches. But I probably
won’t write you up here unless I’m actually going to use your app myself.