San Diego’s Bump.com Ready to Hit the Road With Auto-Based Social Networking

With less than two weeks to go before one of the big tech meetings of the year, the countdown has begun at the Bump network’s headquarters in the scenic San Diego coastal community of La Jolla.

After unveiling a beta version of its Bump.com social network technology at the Demo Fall conference almost six months ago, the startup plans to officially launch the commercial version of the Bump social network at the 18th annual SXSW (South by Southwest) Interactive Festival, which begins March 11 in Austin, TX.

In anticipation of Bump.com’s rollout, founder Mitch Thrower tells me the company recently acquired Plateside, a social networking app in the iTunes store, after previously acquiring Platester.com and YourPlates.com. He says Bump.com also closed an undisclosed round of funding last week. Thrower told me several weeks ago that Bump.com was working to raise about $3.5 million, after it had pulled together about $1 million in initial funding (from mostly individual investors) shortly after he founded the company in 2009.

The founding CEO says he started Bump.com with a vision of creating a communications platform that can send voice, text, and e-mail messages to motorists in the Bump network—by simply scanning an image of their license plate.

When you join the Bump network, you essentially activate an account for your car, based on the license plate number listed in public databases for motor vehicle registrations. The company’s technology allows subscribers to use a car’s license plate number to send messages and even place calls through the Bump network. (Once a message has been sent to a license plate through the Bump.com service, it is stored in Bump.com’s database until the owner of the plate registers with Bump.com-a process known as “claiming” a license plate.) Registered users can link their Bump.com account to their mobile phone, and to their Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Bump.com also has developed automated license plate recognition technology, capable of reading five license plates per second, so subscribers can use their mobile phone cameras to connect to other vehicles by taking a

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.