Of the 16 social and media technologies making their debut at the Demo conference in Silicon Valley, Bump.com was perhaps the most intriguing and original idea.
It’s social networking through your US number plate, or license plate as it’s called here – with possibilities for dating, car talk, safety messages and receiving offers all wrapped up in your bumper.
Bump is only going to be successful though if a substantial number of people also think it’s a good idea and bother to claim their license plates.
You can do this by going to the Bump.com website to provide your email address and receive a beta key to try the service out. Your Bump email address becomes State.plate@bump.com, for example, CA.5XYZ678@bump.com.
Once on the system, you can receive email, text, voicemails and even direct phone calls from people who have spotted your license plate. They can reach you by email, text, scanning your plate with their camera phones or calling you through a Bump app.
The kind of messages Bump predicts you’ll receive? : “Your car alarm is going off”, “Your brake light is out” “Congratulations, your car was spotted in our lot! Claim your free trial” and “Are you single? Check out my Facebook page”. Links to Facebook and Twitter are de rigueur.
Bump says its software can integrate with existing video cameras to allow business owners to identify license plates in their vicinity and send out offers. That may alarm some Bump users, but the start-up says privacy settings allow users to choose what and how they want to receive any offers or messages.
Other services presented that I’d like to check out were HDemail from Scayl, a fast way to send files of unlimited size as email attachments, Trailmeme, a different way of visually organising your web research through diagrams and trails of web pages and Needly, a classifieds site with a much better interface and sale mechanisms than Craigslist.
