How Your License Plate Could Be Your New Username [INVITES]

This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark.. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details href="http://mashable.com/bizspark/">here. src="http://cdn.mashable.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/traffic.jpg" alt="" title="traffic" width="225" height="225" class="alignright" />Name: href="http://bump.com/" >Bump Quick Pitch: Bump allows users to connect online and offline via unique identifiers, including license plates, mobile phones and online profiles. Genius Idea: Ever wanted to tell the driver in front of you that their lights are off? Or maybe you’ve wanted to be the good Samaritan and warn someone that his meter has expired. Perhaps you just find the driver in the adjacent vehicle visually stimulating and are hoping they think the same about you. These street scenarios face us drivers on a daily basis, but there’s never been an easy or safe way to message another driver or car owner. Enter Bump, a recently launched, private-beta startup (we’ve got invites) that has created a way to message other drivers by using the one unique identifier all drivers have in common: our license plates. src="http://cdn.mashable.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/bump.jpg" alt="" title="bump" width="640" height="382" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-388388" /> Bump users can message other drivers through voice-automated commands, photo snapshots of license plates and SMS. Bump also includes e-mail support, which you can use by directing your message to State.Plate@bump.com, where state is the two-digit state name abbreviation and plate is the individual’s license plate number. Bump stores all messages sent to a particular license plate in the system until the plate in question is claimed by the plate owner. If you claim your plate, you can then start to receive messages as voice messages, e-mails or text messages. Of course, this also means that those messages you attempt to send to the hottie in the Audi TT won’t get delivered unless he or she has also claimed their plate on Bump — a clear limitation of the service at launch. Bump members can also connect their href="http://mashable.com/categoy/twitter">Twitter, href="http://mashable.com/category/facebook">Facebook, and eventually Match.com profiles, e-mail accounts and cell phone numbers with their license plate to further complete the loop between the physical world and the digital world.

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Your License Plate as Your Identity

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/> src="http://cdn.mashable.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/BUMPinTraffic.jpg" alt="" title="BUMPinTraffic" width="640" height="480" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-386260" /> Eventually Bump will enter AAA’s realm and offer premium services to drives through a member program. Upgrades will include discount offers, special privileges and roadside assistance. The company is also working with rental car companies, sports leagues and fast-food outlets on marketing initiatives to target special offers to members on the road by tapping into existing video cameras. In this capacity, Bump aims to bring href="http://mashable.com/tag/groupon">Groupon-like discounts to the real world through license plates, which may be a bit too ambitious for privacy-conscious drivers. The service’s immediate and long-term success will rely on drivers claiming their plates. The challenge, however, is that even without offers directed at individual license plates, Bump’s technology will likely be a bit too intrusive for those who would prefer not to incorporate their license plate as part of their virtual and physical identities. The license plate may seem like an obvious public identifier, but to those with higher profiles, their license plate number is not exactly information they want to be part of the public domain. For others, their license plate will be a welcome natural identifier to help bridge the gap between their online persona and offline life. Right now Bump is available as a website and mobile web app, but the company has plans to release an app for href="http://mashable.com/tag/iphone">iPhone, href="http://mashable.com/android">Android and href="http://mashable.com/tag/blackberry">BlackBerry in the near future. Bump is still in private beta, but 250 Mashable readers can start using the service today. Simply enter the invite code “mashable” during the registration process. Bump has raised $1 million in Series A funding and recently appeared at DEMO in Silicon Valley. The startup is in the process of raising a Series B round that will likely reach $8 million. The startup also recently acquired Platester, a license plate messaging platform, for an undisclosed sum. Image courtesy of href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/bike/" >richardmasoner, Flickr

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Sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark

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/> src="http://cdn.mashable.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/bizspark.jpg" border="0" alt="" align="left" style="margin: 10px;">BizSpark is a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can href="http://mashable.com/bizspark">sign up today.

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/>Reviews: href="http://www.blippr.com/apps/336868-Android" >Android, href="http://www.blippr.com/apps/393528-BlackBerry-Rocks" >BlackBerry Rocks!, href="http://www.blippr.com/apps/336650-Facebook" >Facebook, href="http://www.blippr.com/apps/336659-Flickr" >Flickr, href="http://www.blippr.com/apps/337174-Mashable" >Mashable, href="http://www.blippr.com/apps/336651-Twitter" >Twitter, href="http://www.blippr.com/apps/469362-iPhone" >iPhone More About: href="http://mashable.com/tag/bizspark/">bizspark, href="http://mashable.com/tag/bump-com/">bump.com, href="http://mashable.com/tag/driving/">driving, href="http://mashable.com/tag/license-plates/">license plates, href="http://mashable.com/tag/spark-of-genius/">spark-of-genius style="margin-top:10px;">For more href="http://mashable.com/tech/">Tech coverage:

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Why Facebook Is (Probably) Turning To Android To Make Mobile Even More Social

Earlier today we published the full transcript of an engrossing, detailed interview we had with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg that focused primarily on the social network’s mobile plans. During our conversation, he talked about how Facebook would ideally like to make your entire phone social: enter your login information once, and your apps should know about your interests and who your friends are. Compelling as that may sound (assuming you aren’t concerned about any potential privacy issues), there’s still a big roadblock to seeing it come to fruition: Facebook would need to have deep access to the phone’s OS to make this happen.

That isn’t going to happen any time soon on the iPhone, which, as Zuckerberg says, is “hard to penetrate” — without Apple’s cooperation, Facebook won’t be able to do an especially robust integration:

Mark Zuckerberg: For platforms that are really important, but are hard to penetrate, like iPhone, we’ll just do as much as we can. For Android, we can customize it a bit more. Other folks are going to want to work with us on specific things. But, our goal is not to build a phone that competes with the iPhone or anything like that.

And Facebook isn’t about to build its own operating system from the ground up, because that would be a time and resource-consuming endeavor. Which leaves… Android.

Google’s mobile operating system is famously open-source, which means that other companies like Facebook are free to tweak it to their heart’s content, revamping the UI or even adding a new social layer, while leaving the nuts and bolts that make the phone tick in place. Mucking with Android code could preclude Facebook from being able to include some of Google’s Android applications, like Gmail and Android Market — Google has tighter restrictions on who can bundle these apps — but that may not be a dealbreaker for the social network, especially if it’s looking to make the phone a Facebook-centric experience.

Rumors of Facebook working on a custom Android build were first reported by Silicon Alley Insider, after our original story describing Facebook’s mobile ambitions first came out over the weekend. And during our interview Zuckerberg essentially confirmed that Facebook was at least experimenting with Android:

Mark Zuckerberg: I mean, who knows, 10 years down the road, maybe we’ll build our own operating system or something, but who knows. That is more history than we’ve had so far with the company, so it is really hard to predict that far out. But for now, I think, everything is going to be shades of integration, rather than starting from the ground up and building a whole system. Jason Kincaid: So, it sounds like a customized version of Android seems like the best thing, the deepest integration you could do without building your own operating system. Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah, and I mean… Michael Arrington: Is that putting words in your mouth? Mark Zuckerberg: No, I mean, we’ve looked a bunch of different technical things. I know if we were going to build an operating system, then we wouldn’t have anything to talk about for 4 years. And I know we didn’t start 4 years ago, so I know we’re nowhere near anything on that. What I can say generally is that our goal is not to build an operating system from scratch, or else not to design hardware from scratch. Our goal is to make it so that we can design the best integrations in the widest variety of phones.

And to add even more fuel to the fire: as I wrote this, Bloomberg published a report stating that “Facebook Inc. is working with mobile-handset manufacturer INQ Mobile Ltd. on two smartphones that may be carried by AT&T Inc.,” which are “slated to run Google Inc.’s Android operating system”.

How Musicians Use Social Media to Inspire Activism [VIDEO]

A panel of musicians, marketing executives and media professionals joined the UN Foundation’s Executive Director of Global Partnerships Elizabeth Gore to explore how musicians and other celebrities can use social media to drive support for social issues. The panel, which included musicians Lupe Fiasco and Kenna Zemedkun, VP of Sustainability Marketing at ignition Simon Isaacs, Founder of Lovesocial Azita Ardakani, and Rolling Stone contributing writer Laura Checkoway, discussed previous challenges and successes involved in creating awareness for social causes and talked about how href="http://mashable.com/2010/01/04/social-media-tools-bands/">new forms of media — including Twitter — are enabling celebrities to href="http://mashable.com/2010/03/12/musicians-social-media/">rally their fan bases directly. You can watch the full discussion from Mashable’s and 92Y’s href="http://mashable.com/un-week/digital-media-lounge/agenda/">UN Week Digital Media Lounge above.

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Mark Zuckerberg Donates $100 Million to Newark Public Schools

Mark Zuckerberg is donating $100 million to the Newark public school system. The donation will be the first part of a foundation intended improve U.S. education.

Zuckerberg will announce the contribution Friday on The Oprah Winfrey Show, where he will be joined by Newark Mayor Cory A. Booker and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/23/education/23newark.html?_r=1" >The New York Times broke news of Zuckerberg’s educational fund shortly before href="http://blogs.forbes.com/stevenbertoni/2010/09/22/facebooks-zuckerberg-now-richer-than-apples-steve-jobs/" >Forbes revealed that the Facebook founder and CEO had climbed to the thirty-fifth position on its annual list of wealthy Americans. Forbes estimates that Zuckerberg is now worth $6.9 billion, putting him seven spots above Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who is estimated to be worth $6.1 billion, ranking 42 on Forbes’ list.

Some will call the donation calculated. The timing of the announcement is in sync with the October 1 release of href="http://mashable.com/tag/the-social-network/">The Social Network, based on Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaires, neither of which protrays Zuckerberg in the most favorable manner. The donation could also be aimed at counteracting any negative stigma that could arise from his new rank on the Forbes 400.

The fact of the matter is that Mark Zuckerberg just donated $100 million of his own personal wealth to one of the country’s worst school systems. This is the sort of philanthropy that we see from the likes of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates; frankly, it’s amazing to have someone else with the ability to contribute at that level to that field. Ideally, we should be able to take the gesture at face value and not taint it with speculation.

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More About: href="http://mashable.com/tag/bill-gates/">bill gates, href="http://mashable.com/tag/facebook/">facebook, href="http://mashable.com/tag/mark-zuckerberg/">mark zuckerberg, href="http://mashable.com/tag/philanthropy/">philanthropy, href="http://mashable.com/tag/social-good/">social good, href="http://mashable.com/tag/the-social-network/">the social network, href="http://mashable.com/tag/trending/">trending, href="http://mashable.com/tag/warren-buffett/">Warren Buffett

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Zuckerberg: Social Is Not A Layer You Add (*Cough* Google *Cough*)

Earlier this afternoon, we posted our most recent interview with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The talk is full of gems of information, such as Facebook’s thoughts about social phones. But a more general statement Zuckerberg made about socialness is also very interesting. Because he seems to be taking a direct shot at Google.

“Even the companies that are starting to come around to thinking, ‘oh maybe we should do some social stuff’’, I still think a lot of them are only thinking about it on a surface layer,” Zuckerberg says. “It’s like ‘OK, I have my product, maybe I’ll add two or three social features and we’ll check that box’,” he continues. “That’s not what social is.“

“You have to design it in from the ground up,” is how Zuckerberg sees it. He cites Zynga and Quora as two companies doing this correctly. “They’ve designed their whole product around the idea that your friends will be here with you,” he says.

One company he doesn’t mention as doing this correctly is Google. In fact, the entire part about adding social as a layer seems to be a shot at them. Recent comments by Google CEO Eric Schmidt directly state that Google’s forthcoming social strategy will be about adding a social layer to existing products. “Google Me is not a product, it’s a social layer across all products,” Schmidt said at Google’s Zeitgeist event a couple weeks ago.

So it looks like Facebook and Google are going to agree to disagree on the concept of social as a layer versus social as a foundation. So far, clearly, Facebook is winning this argument.

Here’s the key blurb from Zuckerberg in context:

One thing that I think is really important — that I think is context for this, is that I generally think that most other companies now are undervaluing how important social integration is. Right, so even the companies that are starting to come around to thinking, ‘oh maybe we should do some social stuff’, I still think a lot of them are only thinking about it on a surface layer, where it’s like “OK, I have my product, maybe I’ll add two or three social features and we’ll check that box”. That’s not what social is. Social is. You have to design it in from the ground up. These experiences like what Zynga is doing or what a company like Quora is doing, I think that they have just a really good social integration. They’ve designed their whole product around the idea that your friends will be here with you. Everyone has a real identity for themselves. And those are fundamental building blocks. Now, I don’t know how long it’s going to take to get the mobile environments that you see today to a state where you can build really robust social applications on top of it. So that’s the biggest driving force for us — to try to work with these folks and see how deep we can get on our own to make sure that we can build that plumbing. Our goal is to make it exist.

That last bit seems to imply Facebook’s work on diving deep within Android to make it fundamentally more social. Thanks to the open nature of that platform, Facebook can do that. Too bad Google itself isn’t open.

[photo: flickr/steve damron]

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