Google has acquired Bump, the app that lets users share contact information, photos, videos, and files simply by bumping two mobile devices together.
The news was announced by both companies on Monday, though neither gave any details regarding how much the deal was worth. However, AllThingsD reported that “a source close to the transaction” said the Web giant paid between $30 million and $60 million for the company.
“We couldn’t be more thrilled to join Google, a company that shares our belief that the application of computing to difficult problems can fundamentally change the way that we interact with one another and the world,” Bump CEO and co-founder David Lieb said in a post on the start-up’s website.
Lieb said that both Bump and the company’s more recently released Flock app, which allows for easy photo-sharing with friends through privately shared albums, would “continue to work as they always have for now”, and asked users to “stay tuned for future updates”.
The deal comes just days before Apple is set to roll out a similar file-sharing app, AirDrop, with the launch of iOS 7 later this week.
Bump is a long-established company – at least, long-established for the smartphone world – that made quite a splash with its app when it launched for iPhone and Android users in 2009. The idea of ‘magically’ transferring data between handsets by just bumping them together was novel at the time. During recent fourth anniversary celebrations, the company announced the app had been downloaded 125 million times with a billion photos sent between devices.
Commenting on the acquisition, a Google spokesperson told AllThingsD, “The Bump team has demonstrated a strong ability to quickly build and develop products that users love, and we think they’ll be a great fit at Google.”
It’s not known what plans Google has in store for Bump – it may, for example, decide to shutter the app and use its technology for its own purposes – but no doubt we’ll have a better understanding in the not-too-distant future.
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