• New York Times, Tuesday, January 11, 2011 1:39 PM

Bump Technologies just raised $16.5 million in venture capital, led by Andreessen Horowitz, along with existing investors, including Sequoia Capital and Ron Conway. What the heck is Bump? Simply put, it's an app that lets people literally bump their smartphones together to exchange everything from business cards to photos and even money. "The company is changing direction because people started using Bump more for social interactions than business ones," writes The New York Times.

For instance, users now share nearly a million photos daily, compared to just 40,000 contacts. "Bump just opens up a whole new landscape of social interactions and interpersonal functions and uses and photo-sharing and transactions, all based on physical proximity," Marc Andreessen, the Andreessen Horowitz partner who will join Bump's board, tells The Times. What sets Bump apart from a million other social sharing services, today, is its intimacy, cofounder David Lieb tells The Times. "It's a proximity-based social network, for people and things you're actually physically interacting with."

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