There’s new application launching here at the CTIA Wireless 2011 conference in Orlando, Florida: Gogobeans. The app is a digital locker of sorts for all your phone’s content – photos, videos, contacts, bookmarks, files, apps and more. So in one sense, it’s like a cloud-based backup of everything on your phone. But Gogobeans isn’t just a backup tool – it’s a platform where content can be shared with anyone just by shaking your phone.
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“Shake to Bounce”
This sharing feature, which Gogobeans calls “Shake to Bounce,” works by using the phone’s accelerometer. The company’s servers register that you shook your phone, but it does not access your location. When another user then shakes his or her phone, the action causes their name appear in a list of people to share with.
This type of sharing may remind you a lot of how the Bump app works, but instead of tapping phones to share content, users are shaking their phones. However, there’s a practical purpose to this feature – you don’t have to be in close proximity to the other user in order to share items this way.
That means you can send photos to mom and dad across town, files to a remotely located office colleague or videos to a far-away friend, all with just a shake. The app supports sharing of applications too. But instead of simply recommending the app, a placeholder is downloaded to the device. The other user then can complete the app download process and/or purchase from the appropriate application store.
And in addition to one-to-one sharing, you can use the app to share from your phone to Twitter and Facebook.
I’m not convinced that we’ll all be shaking our phones to share apps in the future, but it’s interesting to see the various solutions developers have come up with to the app discovery problem. There are too many apps in the app store – even when apps are “curated” like Apple is doing. We know that personal recommendations work best, but how do you access them? Bumping phones? Sharing on Facebook? Reading blogs? App search engines?
Shaking?
Of course, app sharing isn’t Gogobeans’ only feature, but it’s the one that addresses the biggest pain point for me: finding good apps.
Googbeans is available on iPhone and Android. Anyone want to share apps?
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