Re:Bump (YC S09) has been acquired by Google
by blub on Monday September 16, 2013 @03:25PM
(#6395272)
I think your statements are misleading, and make the technology look worse than it seems.
Apple and the US market aren't the entire universe. NFC is already used in other countries for secure communication (payments, ID, etc), but that's not even one of the most interesting aspects of it.
I will stick to Bump, since that's the subject of the topic: when I checked a couple of years ago, their way of connecting two devices was primitive and rather insecure, it was essentially a heuristic that used several parameters to guess which two users "bumped".
NFC would have solved the problem perfectly, with no network communication needed and 100% user-to-user match rate.
Apple and the US market aren't the entire universe. NFC is already used in other countries for secure communication (payments, ID, etc), but that's not even one of the most interesting aspects of it.
I will stick to Bump, since that's the subject of the topic: when I checked a couple of years ago, their way of connecting two devices was primitive and rather insecure, it was essentially a heuristic that used several parameters to guess which two users "bumped". NFC would have solved the problem perfectly, with no network communication needed and 100% user-to-user match rate.