Daily Mobile Industry Snippets!
Paypal, which boasts more than 81 million active accounts in 190 markets and 24 currencies around the world, says its new iPhone app has reached one million downloads in less than three weeks since its release.
The new Paypal iPhone app allows users to split restaurant checks, collect money for events, set reminders for recurring payments, donate to their favorite causes and manage their PayPal accounts. It is integrated with BUMP technologies, so that users can exchange the information and close transactions by ‘bumping’ their phones together.
The company also boasts applications for Android and Blackberry devices, but to date hasn’t released download numbers for those platforms.
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Daily Mobile Industry Snippets!
Bump, which offers the service that lets you tap two phones together to swap contact information, photos, or other data, is launching a new API for Android and the iPad. This API will allow developers to integrate Bump’s data exchange technology into their own apps. For now, the Android API will only be available to a limited number of developers as a private beta, while the iPad API is open to everyone, an extension of the existing Bump iPhone API.
One of the best parts of the Bump API is that it works between platforms — if you’ve designed a photo application for both iPhone and Android, users of either OS will be able to tap their phones together to exchange data.
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Daily Mobile Industry Snippets!
PayPal has offered a free application for the iPhone ever since the App Store launched in mid-2008, and it has gradually been improving over time. They has just launched an upgraded iPhone application that adds new features and includes a facelift that’s meant to help instill a greater sense of security. And it now has Bump prominently featured in the app as a quick way to initiate transactions.
First, it now allows you to send a money request to your contacts (it’s essentially a bill). Second, you can now withdraw money out of your PayPal account and deposit it into your bank account. And there’s the Bump integration, which allows you to exchange money simply by tapping two iPhones together and entering the amount of the transaction. Other new features includes an integrated tip calculator and bill splitter, as well as a reminder function that alerts you when you need to send or withdraw money.
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Daily Mobile Industry Snippets!
Sequoia-backed Bump Technologies Inc. is closing in on 10 million downloads for its nifty contact and data-sharing app. With iPhone and iPod Touch sales estimated at 80 million, this means the app is on more than 10 percent of Apple’s phones.
The app let you literally bump two phones together and pass contact information like phone numbers, names and e-mail addresses between them.
But it was a feature that was easy to duplicate, and hence, to overcome the risk of becoming a feature of someone else’s product, Bump opened up and became a platform by launching an application programming interface (API). The hope is that Bump can find a business model by providing its core technology to other companies to power all kinds of physical data sharing, whether it’s trading virtual coins in a game, contact information on a business card or even payments. The company recently launched a Facebook integration that lets users friend each other on the spot to take advantage of that. A Twitter integration that lets you follow a person will come shortly.
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Daily Mobile Industry Snippets!
BUMP is opening its iPhone API to everyone. Developers who implement Bump’s API can use it to transfer data between two nearby phones simply by asking users to tap their devices together.
To kickstart its API launch, Bump held a contest that invited developers to work the API into their iPhone applications. Some winning apps include Checkout, an app which lets you share gift cards with friends by tapping your phones together; CloudNote, which lets you swap digital Post-It notes; and SocialFuse, which allows you to connect on Twitter and LinkedIn with someone - all by tapping your phones together.
CEO David Lieb says that Bump issued 300 developer keys so far. And while the current API is iPhone only, an Android version is in the works — and it’s getting “an increasing number of requests”. Bump’s official mobile application, which is available on both iPhone and Android, is now closing in on 10 million downloads.
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