Google acquires Bump. It's not the "bumping" that's valuable. It's figuring out two people are in proximity to each other that allows them to bump - that's Gold.
Last year in December, I spent a week wrote an API that processes up to 5 mobile inputs and cross references them to see if they are the same. The idea was to use multiple input factors to determine if two devices were close to each other (Color R.I.P - has some pending pattents surround this). They most challenging parts were matching audio and photo. I had the demo up and running on my iPhone in a week though.
Is that a very difficult problem? I thought they just grab the location from the phone, send it to their service, and their service looks for other bumps in the physical and temporal vicinity. It's a rather clever solution, but not exactly a technology that seems worth acquiring, unless there are some patents or tricky performance optimizations I'm missing.
This is such a classic HN comment, sorry. You start off with a totally fair premise, asking genuinely if this is a difficult problem.
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.
Can anyone speculate? The only thing I'm coming up with is that it might require a geo index for quickly calculating the distances between a huge number of location pairs.
The edge cases are enormous - smartphones aren't always running on the same time, and their internet connection delays might be different (one on WiFi, the other on Edge) so syncing time would be difficult. One might give a location based on GPS, the other just the nearest telephone pole. Or maybe none at all, or the wrong one (it happens), or different poles. If you get only 1 bump every 10 seconds it would be easy, but Bump's market probably like to hang out at social events, making it harder to figure out time-wise which bumps are which.
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.
From what i understand it uses the accelerometer to create a "bump signature" and matches the two devices according to that. The geo-location thing only helps filter that search and i think they introduced that part later on when they got a huge number of users across the globe.
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.
It is in same realm as synching datas I think. GPS is unreliable for close distances, phone clocks, user connections, the reading of the accelerometer...every little part adds fuzziness, and you have to trim down your data to get something relevant, limit the rate of false positive while allowing some leeway.
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.
Not really as far as I was aware as it work(ed) on devices without a GPS fix or hardware. Used accelerometer signals, radio signal strength, as many signals as they could get as I recall. I remember hearing they were even emitting an inaudible tone so that devices in vicinity could pick it up.
Update - Just realized I just fed a troll. Moving on!
Whoa! Hold on there cowboy!
What have we told you about sweeping generalizations??!!
Not every person in India wakes up every morning to fix social issues. They wake up every morning to go to work, feed their families and you know..do what you and I do - when we turn the other way to the glaring poverty and injustice that is visible in our communities.
Ironic. More over, this is exactly why AirBnB should not become an identity store (asking their customers to become verified by scanning and sending their passport info). I do not trust them with my identity.
How is this tripe modded up? A software donkey? Has it ever occurred to this guy that he is talking about another human being? And has history belonged to only those who passed through the hallow halls of Stanford? WTF?
I have do not mean to disrespect any human being sir. (Also, I think I should apologize for using a specific company name in my comment but please read it only as Company X). To be more clear I belong to one such companies which is sending large number of H1B guys to US. When H1B visa is over its the turn of B1 Visa.
H1B visa is for specially skilled people who are in short supply in US. Most of the people including me in reality have no "special" skill that is in short supply in US.
We come here to US and paid enough just to survive + Indian salary.
I have my reservations about the viability of a Klarna type approach in the US - where there is a high level of credit card penetration among the US customers. Since Affirm will require customers to choose that as a payment option, over other funding sources - Paypal, CC and others, there has to be a compelling reason for a customer to choose Affirm. And atleast in the US, where we are card-entrenched, and everyday we make it easier for customers to use their plastic - it's a tough value proposition for Affirm.
Except that wasn't why Paypal became what it is today. The P2P aspect and sufficiently protecting the customer during early days of e-commerce is why Paypal became so big. Removing the need to enter the full credit card info - was a nice to have - and secondary, once use of Paypal became more ubiquitous.
Infact, Affirm would have to hope that customers will use anything other than credit cards to settle with Affirm - because it will be cost prohibitive for them to do that. They would have to find ways to justify the customer settling via ACH. Too little, too late imho.
I blog and whenever I hit a lull, I find that a walk or run is what gets me back on track. The chaos in a normal work week, the number of meetings, the constant context-switching all leads to little chance of forming coherent string of thoughts that can be used to construct a blog post.
Walks and runs also help in uncovering new ways to look at things, asking new questions that previously lay just beneath the surface, and letting your mind wander till they serendipitously uncover these nuances - those are the reasons I find time to do it. Everyone needs those quiet hours - when your mind could be free of clutter, and you could take a strand of thought and examine it more closely than you could have - when there are a hundred things vying for your attention.
Walking or running definitely helps to take your mind off of things long enough for it to realign itself on track. Semi related, but it also peaked my curiosity for nature and I started taking more note of different species I would see while walking or running, such as birds, insects and mammals.
Now, I end up walking partially because I'm always looking forward to what surprise I might see while doing it. Granted, not everyone has access to parks or land farther outside of a city, but when you do, there's lots of small details one misses out on if not looking for them (either up in the trees or near the ground). I still walk and run to refresh my brain, but it also spurred my interest in learning something new at the same time. As a side effect, I end up googling all those random things I run across, so beware of that if one wants to avoid time killers.
The linked article provides very little info on how it actually works. What's the point in writing about something, if you are not going to say anything meaningful?
