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Gogobeans: When Bump met Dropbox

Last updated on July 23, 2020

As longtime readers know, one of my longtime areas of interest are proximity-based sharing, a topic I most recently discussed in the context of AirDrop.. At CTIA, though, I got a chance to meet with Gogobeans, which is combining the notion of a Dropbox-like locker for personal content with Bump-like (or perhaps Color-like) – cloud-based detection of proximity. In Gogobeans’ case, rather than bumping together handsets, they are simply shaken at the same time. One advantage to this is that it facilitates one-to-many transactions; a speaker could share a presentation with an audience. Like Dropbox, Pogoplug, and others, Gogobeans also allows you to share based on e-mail addresses even if the recipient does not yet have the app, and then files shared show up in their locker once their account is claimed.

Gogobeans seems like a smart mashup of two kinds of services that are gaining popularity right now, but the personal cloud space is starting to get a bit crowded and the client-interaction space is a race for viral distribution. In terms of potential competition from either side, I’d see Dropbox introducing proximity-based sharing as an extension of its service more naturally than Bump introducing cloud-based storage.