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Last year, when a friend and I went to buy our first iPhones, the first thing we went out and downloaded was Bump - the app that lets you share simply by bumping your phone into another one. It seemed like magic. At the time, however, it was only meant for sharing contact information and it soon made its way to the back of our app screens before eventually disappearing off our phones.

These days, Bump is much more than simply a magic app to share your phone number and email address and today we got a chance to sit down with Bump co-founder and CEO David Lieb to talk about where the app has gone and where it's headed to next.

Keeping up with every RSS feed item and tweet is hard enough for anybody, let alone someone trying to run a business. That's why each week, ReadWriteBiz rounds up the most important tech news and insights for small and medium-sized businesses.

This week, Google's local business recommendation service Hotpot made its way to the iPhone in the form of a new Google Places app. The Yelp-like recommendation service, which originally launched in November, is also now being featured prominently on Google Maps.

Bump, the mobile app that lets you share information with other people by bumping your phones together, announced tonight that it now has 25 million iPhone and Android users and has raised $16 million from hot investors Andreesen Horowitz, Google-backers Sequoia, early Google investor turned billionaire Ram Shriram and Silicon Valley godfather Ron Conway.

What are these people funding? Bump is a fascinating integration of the online and offline worlds. It's not the Apple-acquired super-intelligent voice-controlled Siri mobile personal assistant, it's not the plug-and-pay Square dongle that raised twice as much venture capital just today, it's not the maybe-it-will work Near Field Communication (NFC) chips that Google is putting in Android phones and in window stickers for businesses - it's yet another new way for users to interact with mobile devices to get things done. We'll probably get a chance to try them all in the fast-approaching world of mobile-enabled commerce.

Fall is the unofficial start of conference season for professionals looking to get together, learn more and network with one another. I've personally been to four conferences in the last month alone, some about technology and business, and one for journalists.

Regardless of industry, there is one age-old relic of professional networking that refuses to die: the business card. Even at the most high-tech and cutting edge of events, you still can't mingle without collecting a pocket full of paper cards. Surely, this can't go on forever. The business card is ripe to be disrupted. But what will replace it?

PayPal's mobile application for Android was updated this week with support for a new feature: bump technology. Actually, Bump Technologies. Bump is a startup that lets you share information between two smartphones by tapping the phones together. The company already has its own mobile application, which lets you share contact info, photos, calendar events or social networking friend requests via bump. Now that same technology is being used for mobile payments in the updated PayPal for Android app.

Bump, the innovative mobile app that lets you exchange contact information by bumping your phone together with someone else's, just announced the availability of version 2.0 in the iTunes app store. The app is newly redesigned and has added some features that are simply awesome.

The app uses your phone's location and accelerometer features to send a signal to the Bump server whenever the app is running and your phone shakes. If Bump detects that two users have their phones jostled in the same place, at the same time, the service presumes those two people want to exchange contact info. It's a great little system, and with the new version users can do even more.

Last month we brought you information about a promotional package available to startups at this years South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) event, a popular place each year to launch new products. This year SXSWi will be holding their second annual Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator competition where a recently released list of 32 finalist companies representing innovative web technologies, entertainment, and social media (both business and personal) will battle for the chance to be named one of four champions.