Ever wanted to Facebook friend someone you just met right on the spot? Until today, that wasn’t easy. But now, if you have an iPhone, all it takes is a single shake, courtesy of the Bump iPhone app.

For those of you unfamiliar with the app, Bump allows you to share contact information with friends simply by shaking your phone once with friends nearby. The app then connects your iPhones and transfer contact information like phone numbers and addresses (for more, read our original review).

Now a new update to the app has brought it a couple of new features, but the one people will be talking about though is the Facebook integration. If you link your Facebook account to Bump and swap contact information with another person who has done the same, you can choose right then and there to initiate a friend request. Once done, a prompt will appear where the other party can accept or deny the friend request.

Jake Mintz, Co-Founder of Bump Technologies, told me that he and his team worked closely with Facebook to make this happen. He’s “pretty sure” that Bump’s the first app that can initiate and accept friend requests; we can’t think of any mobile apps off the top of our heads that do, so we think it’s likely Bump is the first.

Along with the Facebook integration, Bump now boasts custom profiles, which gives users more control over the contact information they share when “bumping” or create frequently-used share settings such as “work,” “personal,” or “fake” (just in case you can’t shake off that persistent and annoying guy/girl at the bar).

Jake says that this is the first of many social media integrations that will come to Bump. So yes, you can expect the ability to follow the people you meet via Twitter with a shake of your iPhone in the near future.

Reviews: Facebook, Twitter

Tags: bump, facebook, iphone, Mobile 2.0

Last December, mobile data swapping startup Bump opened up its iPhone API in a small, private beta. Today, they’re opening the floodgates 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 — a feat that’s still remarkably difficult on most smart phones.

To kickstart its API launch, Bump held a contest that invited developers to work the API into their iPhone applications. You can see a gallery of the winners here. The winning apps include CheckOut, 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 (again, by tapping your phones together). Be sure to check out the gallery page for a half dozen runners-up to get more ideas of what the API can do.

This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark.

Name: Bump

Quick Pitch: Bump makes connecting as simple as bumping two phones together.

Genius Idea: Applications supporting the electronic exchange of contact information, of which there are many, promise a much more convenient and environmentally-friendly experience than the standard business card swap alternative. Digital information sharing, however, is a great-in-theory concept that has yet to become standard-in-practice.

Thanks to a little bump from Apple and the novelty of the app itself, Bump — an iPhone and Android app for instant contact and photo exchange with a bump (literally) — could be the app that actually follows through on that promise and converts us all from paper to digital digits.

The just-bump-it app lets you swap photos and contact details, supports Facebook integration, stores your bump exchange history, and even lets you bump phones with friends to compare mutual contacts.

The application has become pretty darn popular by mobile standards, with 7 million downloads across iPhone and Android devices. Plus, Bump just recently launched their iPhone API, which means iPhone application developers can integrate Bump functionality into their own apps.

The API practically guarantees that Bump will continue to become even more prevalent and prove to be a practical and viable alternative for information exchange at events (even those outside the Valley).

Sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark

BizSpark is a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

Entrepreneurs can take advantage of the Azure Services platform for their website hosting and storage needs. Microsoft recently announced the “new CloudApp()” contest – use the Azure Services Platform for hosting your .NET or PHP app, and you could be the lucky winner of a USD 5000* (please see website for official rules and guidelines).”

Reviews: Android, Facebook, PHP

Tags: Android App, bump, iphone, iphone app, Mobile 2.0, spark-of-genius

Both Phone Arena and Engadget are reporting that Verizon’s version of the Pre will be ‘different,’ Phone Arena going to far as to say that the ‘Palm Pre Plus’ is what’s in Verizon’s system.

Given that we’ve seen the P101VZW in Verizon’s system before, it doesn’t come as much surprise (the Sprint version doesn’t have that extra plus 1). Our hunch is still that we’re looking at a memory bump, but that’s more of an educated guess than inside info.

We’re also expecting the Pixi on Verizon with WiFi, as webOS is meant to be. That’d be the P121VZW, if you roll by FCC IDs instead of product names.

Thanks to Tcub for the tip!

So, reason Apple paid $85 million for Lala is because they were stealing it from Google. Which is like payback, because Google stole Admob from Apple, and oh, lordee is this fight gruesome.

The WSJ uses Apple’s purchase of streaming music service Lala, swooping in to pry it out of Google hands, as a way to tell the tale of two humpbacked giants clashing in a conflict that’s been going on since earlier this summer, first marked—publicly anyway—by Apple’s high-profile non-rejection rejection of Google Voice from the App Store.

More recently, Apple tried to buy AdMob—one of the dominant players in mobile advertising—not only to make more money off of iPhone apps, but to keep Google from buying them. Interestingly, the WSJ says Apple “has been exploring buying iPhone-related technologies that it doesn’t yet have,” meaning we could be seeing more Apple acquisitions soon, or perhaps more bloody bouts of Apple and Google wrestling over companies, especially since Google wants into music, and Apple wants into mobile ads, according to the WSJ.

The other interesting bit the WSJ drops is that “Google is also talking to handset manufacturers about building phones with more prominent Google branding and more preinstalled Google applications,” which sounds sorta kinda like a Google phone.

The WSJ article seems to take a tone of surprise, or shock, that Apple and Google compete on so many fronts, and I’m not quite sure where it’s coming from. They’re so huge, that guess what? They’re gonna bump into each other. It’s just inevitable. And it isn’t even ugly yet. But it will be. [WSJ via MacRumors]

Cyber Monday traffic data has officially arrived, and it should come as no surprise that Amazon was the top visited retail Web site, according to Experian Hitwise.

In fact, Amazon accounted for 15.53 percent of all Cyber Monday traffic to the top 500 retail sites, and saw a whopping 44 percent increase in visits when compared to 2008 traffic. Also of note is that Walmart beat out Target, Best Buy and JCPenney by a solid margin as the second most visited retail Web site. Walmart saw an 11 percent increase from last year, and managed to pull in nearly 10 percent of all Cyber Monday traffic to the top 500 sites.

Interestingly enough, in spite of early indications that the shopping day would smash traffic records, Experian Hitwise found that online visits to the top 500 retail Web sites on Cyber Monday were down by 9 percent from 2008. But, given Coremetrics Cyber Monday sales data, which points to a 13.7 percent increase in online sales over last year, the traffic slump did not negatively affect sales.

Some other interesting Cyber Monday traffic findings include:

- Among the top 20 sites visited, Staples saw the largest increase in visits compared to 2008 with a 61 percent bump, Barnes & Noble saw a 46 percent increase and Amazon saw a 44 percent increase year over year.

- Outside of the top 20, The Apple Store site saw a 71 percent increase in visits on Cyber Monday 2009 versus 2008.

- The biggest online traffic losers in the top 20 were The Home Depot and Overstock.com, who respectively saw 29 percent and 26 percent drops in traffic when compared to 2008.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, sweetandsour.

Reviews: iStockphoto

Tags: amazon, cyber monday

Need overclocking?

In motherboards—as in life—it’s the little things that bring the greatest pleasure.

Take the new Core i5/i7 LGA1156 board, the Asus P7P55D Deluxe. Enthusiasts are used to the flashy heatsinks and tons of ports and slots, but small touches like Asus’s innovative RAM slots will make you take notice. Instead of using the typical latch connectors that can snag the GPU, Asus has designed a system that requires only one side of the RAM to be latched in.

But adding unexpected conveniences is Asus’s M.O. of late. The board also features snag-free I/O shields, a quick-connect for front-panel connectors, and ExpressGate—the somewhat handy pre-OS boot environment. Besides adding such extras, Asus said it spent an inordinate amount of time making sure the board overclocks like a champ. There are multiple ways to overclock: using the Turbo V function, AI Suite, and the OC Tuner in the BIOS. If that’s not enough, the company even includes three ominous switches to let you override BIOS limits on RAM, memory controller, and CPU voltage. Even more interesting is the Turbo V remote. This wired remote lets you power up or down and select from three overclocking profiles or crank up the Bclock in real time.

Since Asus emphasized the automatic overclocking features of the board, this is what we were most interested in testing. The Turbo V auto-overclock was not only fun to watch in action but also fruitful, giving us a 20 percent clock bump. But we actually had the most success overclocking our Core i7-870 using the OC Tuner feature in the BIOS. OC Tuner successfully took the board from 2.93GHz to an extremely stable 3.87GHz.

Asus’s P55 board features single-latch DIMMs for easy RAM removal.

We didn’t get quite as far with Gigabyte’s GA-P55-UD6 automatic overclock feature, but manual overclocks will likely find both boards in the same neighborhood. With this class of motherboard, the limit on overclocking is usually in the CPU, the RAM, the cooling, or the PSU—not the board.

While the overclocking story on the P7P55D was great, the performance was a mixed bag. Generally, motherboard performance in the days of highly integrated core-logic chipsets tends to be boring, with little variance among boards, but we experienced some odd results with the P7P55D that had us scratching our heads. It’s our theory that unexpected discrepancies in performance are the result of Turbo Boost. Intel’s Nehalems automatically overclock based on thermals, power load, and the threading workload. Those are enough variables to make head-on performance evaluations tough. We could disable Turbo Boost, but since that’s not a mode anyone would actually run in, the results would be of little value.

Our final conclusion is that the P7P55D Deluxe is slightly slower than the Gigabyte GA-P55-UD6, but not enough to matter. After all, these boards use the same Intel P55 chipsets. What it comes down to is features. The GA-P55-UD6 has the more flexible six-DIMM configuration and boots faster (15 seconds vs. 30 for the Asus), but doesn’t auto-overclock as well. The Asus P7P55D obviously has overclocking tools galore, including the unique overclocking remote, and saves you about $30.

This is essentially a Taiwanese standoff, with neither board likely to back down. You could almost make your pick based on color and be happy either way.

BassJump is, quite simply, a dedicated subwoofer to compliment your MacBook—in both aesthetics and sound.

Rather than merely plugging in through USB, the BassJump uses proprietary software to remix all audio coming out of your laptop, essentially treating those tinny integrated speakers as tweeters while the BassJump handles the lows.

I can’t believe that this solution works better than simply plugging in a whole new 2.1 speaker system, but I must admit, the Mac Mini styling coaxes my fanboyism to at least give the idea a shot. $80 and available now. gawkerGallery(5411738,8,”); [BassJump]

Google continues to optimize their websites for the iPhone (and Android, and webOS), this time giving Google News the bump. Says the Google Mobile blog:

This new version provides the same richness and personalization on your phone as Google News provides on desktop. Our new homepage displays more stories, sources, and images while keeping [...]

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Google Optimizes Google News for iPhone

The Ear Force X4 was a rare and wonderful product, the only Xbox 360 wireless surround sound headset to integrate voice chat smoothly into the mix. Now the sequel, the Earforce X41, is even better.

The Price

$180 (technically $200, but Amazon sells ‘em cheaper)

The History

Read our X4 review if you’ve never heard of these products before. This article will make a lot more sense.

The Improvements

• 2.4GHz RF instead of IR audio transmission
• USB powered instead of wall jack
• Dolby 7.1 Surround Sound instead of Dolby 5.1

I was skeptical that the Ear Force X41 would be any better than the Ear Force X4. But after using the headset for a week, I’m remiss to return to the X4s I bought last year.

Quite simply, the audio is more consistently clear with the new RF transmission, now that line-of-site and ambient light has become a non-factor. And I think that overall audio quality, while the speaker components themselves remain unchanged, has seen a bump because of this cleaner signal. (For those concerned, I was able to use the headset without interfering with my Xbox’s Wi-Fi adapter or my home network—the primary potential hiccup with using RF instead of IR. Results may vary, I’m sure.)

As for the jump from Dolby 5.1 to 7.1 support, you probably won’t ever notice. Playing Modern Warfare 2, missiles fly by your head with impressive panning, but the sound localization is no better than it was in the X4s…though to be fair, that’s not necessarily a knock, even if the audio lacks the shining moments you’ll enjoy in the best surround sound headphones offered by companies like Sony.
Oh, and the headset still requires AAAs as opposed to bundling a rechargeable lithium ion. I will say, however, that the batteries I tested with have broken the 10-hour barrier by a decent margin, and they’re still operational.

As a wireless, surround sound headset for the Xbox 360, the X41 is at the top of its class (at least partially because it’s still the only product in its class). If you’re willing to go wired, you can save about $100+ on a cheaper version of the Ear Force, or you can take a look at the even more expensive but lauded Astro A40s.

In fact, if you guys are interested, let me know in the comments. I may try to call in a pair of those Astros in to hear for myself. [Turtle Beach]
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Comfortable

Superb chat quality

RF offers smooth audio transmission

Highly specialized but useful product

Overall audio quality is OK, not stellar

AAA batteries? C’mon!