Could you make the process any more complicated? I hear there's this thing called Bluetooth and all you have to do is activate it and zap the phone directly with it. Why communicate with the "cloud" at all?
I think it would be interesting to use Bluetooth to automatically exchange business cards with nearby people (e.g., at a conference) to determine whom you might want to talk to.
Bluetooth is surprisingly difficult to get working between different phones. When phones actually do recognize each other it takes a long time to pair. Once pairing is completed (even between iPhones this takes ~45 when it works) transfers speeds are fast. Communicating with our server in the cloud is a compromise, but it eliminates the cross-platform compatability and pairing problems of Bluetooth.
As someone else noted, you're still waiting around for ~25 seconds with Bump. That's an incremental improvement and users may be slightly more forgiving of the time.
