They sortof glossed over the ninjitsu that is being used to link the two "bumps" together. My guess is that (since internet access is required), it syncs a clock within the bump application to the bump server, then looks for phones that were "bumped" at the same time.
I'm sure I'm wrong, and would love to hear of other ways that this is happening.
If I'm not, how does this scale up to the millions or hundreds of millions of users that it would require to actually replace the business card (which is what it sounds like it wants to do).
Even if it isn't at millions, how well does it function at events where lots and lots of people are "bumping" (clever name, I have already verbed it)?
Finally...and this is what would--to me--kill it: the blackberry does not have an accelerometer. :(
I'd imagine they also do some geolocation, so it's two users who bumped at the same time and same place. Dunno how accurate a ___location they can get, but unless it's a really crowded mixer, this should probably enough to uniquely ID people. It also suggests some interesting features, eg. the software could record when & where you met somebody, and could suggest other people who were present at the time.
I think the time stamp is more important for matching devices. In fact, theoretically, with an accurate enough time stamp you wouldn't need a ___location to match the devices virtually all the time.
Another idea I had would be to tell the users to knock the devices together twice. That way, you would have another dimension for matching devices: the interval between the knocks should be the same, and that doesn't depend on the clocks being synchronized on the two devices.
They sortof glossed over the ninjitsu that is being used to link the two "bumps" together. My guess is that (since internet access is required), it syncs a clock within the bump application to the bump server, then looks for phones that were "bumped" at the same time.
I'm sure I'm wrong, and would love to hear of other ways that this is happening.
If I'm not, how does this scale up to the millions or hundreds of millions of users that it would require to actually replace the business card (which is what it sounds like it wants to do).
Even if it isn't at millions, how well does it function at events where lots and lots of people are "bumping" (clever name, I have already verbed it)?
Finally...and this is what would--to me--kill it: the blackberry does not have an accelerometer. :(