There are many types of bumps. Pregnancy, speed, Colbert and pay certainly all easily come to mind. But when it comes to entrepreneurs, undoubtedly the most exciting one -- outside of being interviewed by Stephen and getting tons of media attention for your new project -- is the app Bump.
Late last year I posted about the Booth School of Business dropout co-creator Dave Lieb's vision of Chicago's entrepreneur tech scene's future, and now we're getting another whiff of what's come to thanks to a nice scoop Fast Company pulled down.
Turns out, Bump, an app that previously let users exchange contacts and photos by just touching phones together, has evolved with a new service called Bump Pay.
It operates on PayPal and could conceivably make services like Square -- the mobile accessory that lets small businesses take credit cards -- moot. Then again, there are folks out there who are still afraid of giving out their credit card information online and might be just as hesitant to store it on their phones. But it's super-slick and easy to use.
In the video demonstration of it over on Fast Company, transferring funds from one phone to another takes just under 13 seconds. That's almost as long as it takes someone to get their wallet out, fiddle around for a credit card and slide it for payment. Pretty freakin' sweet.
Lieb told Fast Company that it might be integrated into the normal Bump in the future, "But we wanted to test this idea out as a separate app to see if Bump Pay is interesting and useful enough to people, rather than conflating it with Bump right now."
Read more over at Fast Company and also hop over to the iTunes store to give it a whirl. It's free to try, so what do you have to lose? Other than, you know, the money you're gonna be giving way through the app.
David Wolinsky is a freelance writer and a lifelong Chicagoan. In addition to currently serving as an interviewer-writer for Adult Swim, he's also a columnist for EGM. He was the Chicago city editor for The Onion A.V. Club where he provided in-depth daily coverage of this city's bustling arts/entertainment scene for half a decade. When not playing video games for work he's thinking of dashing out to Chicago Diner, Pizano's, or Yummy Yummy. His first career aspirations were to be a game-show host.
