Making Money Without

Bump Technologies makes an app that lets people bump their phones together to exchange things like business cards, photos and even money.

On Tuesday, Bump will announce that it has raised $16.5 million in venture capital. The firm Andreessen Horowitz is Bump’s newest investor, and its previous investors, including Sequoia Capital and Ron Conway, also contributed.

Bump started in 2008 as a way for people to exchange contact information without trading old-fashioned paper business cards. But in its newest incarnation, the start-up wants to become a mobile social network for exchanging photos and messages with family and friends.

Now, in addition to contact information, people with iPhones or Android phones can share photos, music, calendar appointments and location, and can also become friends on social networks and send messages to one another. Other apps also use the technology. PayPal, for instance, lets people exchange money by bumping their phones, and two apps trade sexual compatibility information.

The company is changing direction because people started using Bump more for social interactions than business ones, said two of its founders, David Lieb and Jake Mintz. For example, each day people now share about 40,000 contacts but almost a million photos.

“Bump just opens up a whole new landscape of social interactions and interpersonal functions and uses and photo-sharing and transactions, all based on physical proximity,” said Marc Andreessen, the Andreessen Horowitz partner who will join Bump’s board.

There are many other social networks that people already use on their phones to share photos, location and status updates, like Facebook, Foursquare and Instagram.

Bump is different, the founders said, because it enables private exchanges between two people, unlike others that are for publishing messages or photos to wider groups or the public.

“It’s a proximity-based social network, for people and things you’re actually physically interacting with,” Mr. Lieb said.

Bump is one of a group of mobile apps that give people a way to use Internet-connected cellphones to bridge the virtual and physical worlds.

That could become a way to make money, the founders said. For example, people could someday bump their phones to get information or coupons from businesses or brands. “That could be valuable to merchants,” Mr. Mintz said.

Other apps, like Shopkick, offer similar ways for businesses to reach customers. Bump is not making money yet, beyond a bit from other companies that license its technology.

Bump works by gathering several signals from phones, including location and motion detection. Those signals are sent to Bump’s servers, where Bump figures out if another phone in the same place just experienced a bump, then matches the two phones. It all takes place immediately.

Andreessen Horowitz has been busy. On Monday, the firm also announced that it invested in Groupon’s $950 million round of fund-raising. The firm invests in very small Web companies and very big ones, and the Bump and Groupon investments exemplify both ends of the spectrum.

Goldman Sachs Says Facebook Offer Barred From US Investors, Blames NYT's For Making Plans Public

from the and-so-it-goes dept

We've already talked a bit about the Goldman Sachs/Facebook situation -- and the fact that much of it seems to involve skirting around existing regulations to try to get people to invest in Facebook without actually going public. The latest shift in this is that Goldman Sachs has announced that the offering is no longer available to US investors, and somehow it's all the NY Times' fault.



The reality is a little more nuanced. The thing is, the SEC heavily regulates the IPO process, because (officially) it doesn't want companies to abuse the process, lie to investors, trick them into buying shares in something they don't understand or that's really much riskier, etc. We've discussed in the past, and years back, VentureBeat had a great article that noted many startups appeared to violate the basics of SEC regulations even in just saying they were raising money from private investors, because just talking about it publicly can be seen as a form of a "public offering." It seems that Goldman was becoming worried that all of the public scrutiny on this deal was suddenly getting mighty close to being a "public offering" type of situation, in which the SEC could conceivably step in and claim that it needs to follow all of the standard IPO rules -- which it had not been doing. Goldman has apparently hoped to keep everything a lot more quiet, but the NY Times broke the story, and then everyone else piled on.



The whole thing remains a little silly. This whole thing has been an effort to route around the regulations from the beginning, so this is just the latest piece of that, though it may serve to annoy a lot of American Goldman clients. In the end, it wouldn't surprise me to find out that many of them figure out offshore vehicles for getting in on this deal anyway.

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Source:http://removeripoffreports.net/

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