Google Bumps Off Bump

Google appears to be having a New Year’s clear out, announcing today that it is shutting down the Bump and Flock apps which it acquired only four months ago.

Bump CEO and co-founder David Lieb confirmed the news in a post on the company’s blog, stating that “we are now deeply focused on our new projects within Google, and we’ve decided to discontinue Bump and Flock.”

Cost a bumper $30 million

Bought by Google back in September for a reported $30 million, Bump allowed the wireless sharing of information such as contact details, photos, and videos between devices via touching or bumping them together. Flock, meanwhile, allowed a single shared album to be automatically constructed from multiple users’ phones, detecting which of your friends were included in relevant images and sharing them accordingly. Users could also use the app to share photos with their PC quickly and simply.

Following its release, Bump was seen as one of a generation of innovative apps, featuring prominently in the television advertisements for Samsung’s Galaxy S3 smartphone, which spurred Apple on to further develop its Airdrop technology.

The apps will be shut down from 31st January, and removed from the iOS app store and Google Play. Users have till the end of the month to export any user data they want to keep from either app;  as all app data will be deleted at this point.

Lieb stated in his blog post that the Bump team will now be working on various new Google projects.

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