What, no fist Bump?

Om Malik — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 16:28:20 +0000

Call me a sucker for cool networking tools, but I love Bump and wrote about the Mountain View, Calif.-based back in August 2010. The company’s audacious goal – to bridge the physical and digital world – made a lot of sense to me. Investors, too, liked the company and have pumped in over $20 million into the company.

Since then, apparently 77 million have downloaded the Bump app and 12 million have used it in past 30 days.

Except I don’t know anyone who either has the app or uses it. I happen to meet a lot of people, and I often ask them to Bump their contact details to me, but most give me a vacant look they normally reserve for a person with limited grip of their faculties. Once when I asked a girl to Bump me her contact info, she left for the ladies room and never came back.

I still don’t get why more people don’t use Bump. It makes sharing contacts so easy. It must be the feature creep — they added a lot of features like sharing music, calendar and other apps, none of which made sense. Hopefully the new focus to go back to its roots — photos and contacts will help them win back attention.

By the way, any theories you have why Bump?

Update: Bump co-founder and CEO David Lieb writes in an email:

Bump frankly isn’t solving a big problem for the Silicon Valley tech crowd. We all have large online presences and can easily connect via many other means. For sharing photos, we all have Dropbox accounts and are comfortable posting most photos to Facebook. But for normal people (12 million of them in just the last 30 days), Bump makes these interactions really accessible and simple. [attached a photo of our Bump Map from our lobby this morning].

For example, a woman from Tennessee that we recently spoke with told us this story: She recently had a baby, and she uses Bump to give photos of the baby from the last week to her parents when she and her family have Sunday night dinners together. She uses Bump b/c it lets her tell a story about the photos in person, rather than just sending an email or posting to FB. It’s somewhat akin to sharing double prints bak when we had photos printed.

We’re also working on some things that we think will resonate with the tech crowd as well as the non-tech crowd; would love to show them to you when we’re a bit closer to launching those.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

GigaOM » Bump Technologies

What, no fist Bump?