Bump Unveils Phone-to-PC Feature

Bump, the Android and iPhone app that lets users share photos and contacts by bumping their phones together, recently added a new feature. Now that they have delivered a quick and easy peer-to-peer sharing service, the team behind Bump is offering a solution to the complex and bothersome process of sharing files with ourselves.

Co-founder and CEO David Lieb says, “We take all our photos with our phones nowadays, but getting them where we want them on other devices is hard.” He adds that because he can never find his cable and finds syncing with his computer “a pain in the pass”, he ends up emailing his photos to himself – a task which is just as inconvenient.

Anyone who takes pictures with their phone (and who doesn't?) is sure to share Lieb's sentiments. In fact, Bump users have been asking for such a feature. According to Lieb, “One of the comments we always hear is, 'I wish my computer worked just as well. I wish there was Bump on my computer,' so we decided to build that.”

Now at 75 million downloads, Bump has been upgraded to allow phone-to-computer sharing as well. To transfer photos, simply open the Bump website on your computer and the Bump app on your phone. Select the images you'd like to move within the app, then tap your mobile device on your computer's space bar, and presto! The photos are in your browser. You can download them to your hard drive, post them to Facebook or Twitter, or create a link to them for sharing with friends and family.

Lieb says that people still want to save their photos to their computer and that they don't want cloud services doing the work in the background for them. Although automated wireless sharing is a great technology, users still want some physical interaction. “We think it's better to make it a bit more intentional, so you actually do a little more work, but in exchange, you get this very cognitively simple thing – you know how it works, and you feel in control.”