App on the knuckles
The Age
Thursday March 25, 2010
Finance is being rocked by gentle Bumps, writes Garry Barker. PAYPAL is moving in where traditional banks fear to tread, as shown by a new iPhone app called Bump that lets people exchange money between PayPal accounts from phone to phone. This arm of eBay is huge, with about 80 million active users and more than 200 million registered subscribers.Its revenue last year totalled $2.8 billion, up 16 per cent from 2008, while the total value of transactions was $71 billion. And mobility is a big growth area.Bump is a free download from Apple's iTunes App Store. The basic PayPal app, which now includes Bump, is free; more complex versions range from $6 to $18.Bump is amazing; great technology executed beautifully and rated in iTunes reviews between awesome and fantastic.Basically, Bump is a neat and unusual way of exchanging data between iPhones, iPod Touch and Android devices €” by just bumping them together gently.In fact, you bump the knuckles of your phone-holding hand against those of the other person in the transaction, just gently, like clinking wine glasses.You need internet access via Wi-Fi or wireless broadband (3G or EDGE). The accelerometer inside the iPhone acts as a switch to activate the data transfer, which Bump makes wirelessly between the two devices. No need to remember how to write; simply select the file to transfer and bump. Bump includes a calculation mode so you can, for example, split a restaurant bill. There's also a Facebook mode.But behind this easy knuckle-bump is seriously complex technology involving a sophisticated algorithm running on the developer's servers.When the app feels a bump, it sends the information to the server, where the algorithm is listening for bumps on devices all over the world and matching the right ones. To narrow the search a bit, Bump uses the GPS location of each bump; no danger of bumping someone in, say, Chicago when you are in Melbourne. Without the location data, Bump will not work.The server's software then transfers the information between the phones. If it cannot marry bumper and bumpee, it asks the bumper to bump again.It's just quantum mechanics, really, or something like that. It's beyond me but it works.But the third-party alliances Bump is making are more significant than just quickly getting the phone number from the person leaning on the bar beside you.While you can use Bump to exchange data €” files, photographs, phone numbers and stuff such as recipes for borscht €” the PayPal implementation is a major leap forward for the technology.Now, by bumping, you can swap money, share a restaurant bill or any other kind of bill and do all the stuff PayPal's mobile application enables.The managing director of PayPal Australia, Frerk-Malte Feller, sees a big future for the Bump-enabled version of the company's Send Money app.Feller thinks the technology will develop to include solo bumping, using not someone else's knuckles but a static receptor in a ticket kiosk or a coffee bar.Phone from the train for your cafe latte, grab it, bump the paypoint and be on your way.To use the Bump mode, you and your bumpee each need a PayPal account.From then on, you can use an iPhone, Android phone or iPod Touch (with Wi-Fi) to shop for goods without carrying cash, send money to someone (via PayPal's secure system) and check your PayPal balance.macfileI HAVE generally avoided the dance floor on the basis that two left feet are a hindrance in the tango. There was a brief time, however, when I tried to master the foxtrot using a book of diagrams of footprints placed in a series of improbable places. The fox won. I concluded that such systems were designed by chiropractors to ensure that Michael Flatley wannabes kept arriving to have their various limbs untangled.Of similar ilk are those diagrams that purport to teach you to play the piano in the privacy of your home or any other darkened corner. They have not worked for me, though I have heard of someone who learnt to play Chopsticks that way.Yet, hope springs eternal. I have downloaded an iPhone app named Etude, touted as "sheet music on steroids", good for accomplished musicians or anyone who "couldn't carry a tune in a wheelbarrow". So, lifting the barrow, I invested $3.99 in Etude. It presents on the screen of an iPhone or iPod Touch sheet music and a graphical piano keyboard showing where to put your fingers. There is a MIDI synthesiser and an "in-app store" offering hundreds of songs to download. Currently, these are free.Inevitably, there are links to Facebook and Twitter, allowing you to bore your friends with progress reports on your musical prowess.Having, as I say, two hands full of thumbs as well as two left feet, I cannot offer a recommendation on Etude. It is a modest bit of fun and, as they said about the musical entertainment in the house of ill repute: "Don't shoot the piano player; he's doing his best."But who knows what latent skills you might discover in yourself.
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