By Toria Bodden

“Bump” graphic courtesy of iphone.tmcnet.com

You’re in a bar. A gorgeous person is chatting you up. As opposed to your normal maneuver of providing barflies with your archenemy’s phone number, you’d like to give this person your real digits. The problem is you can barely hear over the music. Alas, you have no pen, or paper, and writing with anything else is a little too Macguyver-esque for you. Good news… there’s an app for that.

Bump is an ingenious little program. You put in a profile, with your name, number, email address, work address, or whatever you deem appropriate. Touch your phone to another phone that has Bump, et voilà: the information is transferred. Don’t want someone to have all your information? Uncheck the boxes next to the information you don’t want shared before “bumping.” In more professional settings, you can plug in your work information and use it to gather contacts at light speed during a professional mingling event.  You can also use the application to share pictures, send invitations, compare calendars, and connect to other services like Twitter and Facebook.

How does it work? Don’t even ask me to explain it. The company admits that their chief technology officer has a degree in quantum mechanics. There is a pretty cool blurb about what happens when phones bump on Bump Technologies’ website, for those who are interested (http://bu.mp/faq).

But Bump is not just a lonely island in a technology sea. Over 100 applications use “bumping.” You can bump phones to transfer money, using Paypal. You can bump your wine preferences to a friend. They even have an app where you bump another person’s phone to compare your sexual compatibility. No, I’m not making this up.

So what’s the best thing about Bump? It’s a step towards world peace. Ok, maybe not world peace, but at least we won’t have to face an iPhone versus Android brawl over this. You can bump an iPhone to an Android phone. The application is available for both types of devices, and the company is currently working on bringing the technology to other platforms. Soon, we will all be able to stand in a circle of touching Androids, iPhones, and probably Blackberrys, singing “Kumbaya.” In the meantime, go forth and bump.