Common Paradox Tech Blog

As I’ve made abundantly clear over the past several days, just about every service that has anything to do with location is launching something at the SXSW festival which starts tomorrow in Austin, Texas. Don’t believe me, here’s a small sampling (Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Whrrl, Plancast, Brizzly, Twitter). So, how are you going to wrap your head around all this location data? SimpleGeo has an awesome way.

Vicarious.ly is a real-time location-based stream of information presented in a nice visual way. While the plan is to eventually launch one for many different cities around the U.S. and eventually the world, the first one is based around Austin, for SXSW. To make it, SimpleGeo partnered with BlockChalk, Brightkite, Bump Technologies, Flickr, Fwix, Foursquare, Gowalla, and Twitter to pull all of their location data and place it both in a constantly-updating stream, and put data points on a Google Map at the top of the page. These data points are represented by the logos of the various companies, so it’s easy to follow visually.

It’s a big night for Bump Technologies, the mobile software startup that recently landed a round of funding led by Sequoia Capital. The company makes mobile apps that let users share their contact information (and other data) simply by tapping their phones together. Up until now the app has been available for the iPhone only, where it’s developed quite a following, and tonight it’s launching on Android as well. The iPhone is getting some love too, as Bump’s 1.2 update was just approved by Apple (you can grab it here).

The updated iPhone app includes a ‘Friend Compare’ feature that looks at the address book and Facebook profiles of you and the person you’re bumping with to see if you have any mutual friends, which can be a good way to break the ice if you’re meeting someone for the first time.

Over the weekend we wrote about Bump Technologies’ recent funding round led by Sequoia Capital, which was revealed (perhaps accidentally) during Sequoia Partner Greg McAdoo’s presentation at Y Combinator’s Startup School. Bump declined to comment on the round on Saturday, but they’ve now confirmed that the round has just closed. They still wouldn’t confirm the exact amount of the round, but we’ve heard it’s over $3 million.

Bump did disclose the angel investors joining the round, and they’ve got some impressive names on board:

Ram Shriram (Sherpalo Ventures; founding board member at Google)
Ron Conway (SV Angel LLC)
Joshua Schachter (founder, Delicious)
Aydin Senkut (Felicis Ventures)

Bump Technologies, the startup behind the very popular iPhone application Bump, has closed a funding round led by Sequoia Capital. We had heard whispers of the news weeks ago, but the company declined to comment on it. Today though, during Sequoia Capital Partner Greg McAdoo’s presentation at Y Combinator Startup School, we got all the confirmation we need: Bump was listed on one of his Powerpoint slides as a company Sequoia has funded this year.

Bump once again declined to comment on the funding and the amount, but the cat is out of the bag. We’ve heard the amount raised was over $1 million, and are looking into getting more details.