There I was, sitting in a lounge, my Boss on one end of the couch, me in my easy chair, the Product Manager on the other end of the couch - all trying to put together a presentation. The Boss had the authoritative copy - the Product Manager has some lead-in slides - I had the Technical deep-dive slides.   At some point, I watched them sitting side by side trying to shuffle the presentation back and forth in email - at which point I had to blurt out: "Wouldn't it be great if you could just Bump the slides between yourselves?"

The look of shock on the PMs face was priceless - there was his iPad sitting on the table before us - he was no stranger to the concept of Bump.   A look of contemplation, then a sigh. "Yea, being able to Bump these slides over would be pretty sweet."  A moments pause, and then we went back to some 1990's collaboration.  

 

Seriously, network copy paste has been a big deal - a lot of tools do it today, though Citrix is arguable the King.  But those tools have different purposes - they're for one user, who is using remote resources - not for multiple users sharing documents and rich text objects.  I have a feeling this is part of what Microsoft's vision for OLE was - the execution just stalled.  There's a serious opportunity here for people to help solve a collaboration problem - getting people in a room sharing information without having to go beyond "copy/paste" semantics, into browsers or email, or instant messaging.  

 

Maybe there is a tool out there I'm just unaware of at this time.  But imagine a world where you're collaborating with people, some on iPads, some on iPhones, some on ubuntu, others on Windows or Macs, and you can share this rich information between each other in a fashion you never have before.    Extrapolate it further to sending files and programs to one another - images, music and movies.  Again: Bump.   I want Bump for my desktop. 

 

Thank you,

-Darthcoder