Competitive rates for car insurance. Insurance companies, like Progressive Direct are increasingly using advanced technology to help consumers easily find cheap car insurance rates online. Progressive Direct is a unit of a U.S. auto insurer and was created specially for that purpose.

To highlight the diversity of Progressive Direct, it recently teamed up with Universal Studios Home Entertainment to insert a running tally (a calculator) of the destruction into the recent HD DVD release of “The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift.” What this calculator, labeled “Progressive Direct: Insurance Damage Estimates”, does is compute the cost of the damage the cars in the movie receive when they crash into each other. Universal and other studios hope that the concept of this calculator will be the first in a stream of branded interactive features on their new DVDs which have about six times as much data capacity as standard DVDs. This feature is hoped to form part of a new revenue stream for the studios. Craig Kornblau, president of Universal Studios Home Entertainment, stated that “Product placement is hard because it doesn’t all fit, but this gives us new opportunities. In the early days, it was a movie on a disc. Now we can take it anywhere.” Steven Kovsky, an electronics analyst for Current Analysis, a technology research company based in Washington, noted: “I can’t remember the last time I or anyone I know checked out the ancillary info on these discs. I’m a little skeptical that the new formats will suddenly unlock vast amounts of new revenue because you are putting more stuff out there that people don’t want to begin with.” Progressive Direct created a Web site, www.progressivefastandfurious.com, and created contests to promote the disc and the movie in exchange for having its name on the crash calculator.

The online insurance marketplace that CarInsurance.com provides benefits both consumers and insurance companies - it allows consumers to shop for car insurance online thus meeting the consumers’ requests, and solving the needs of insurance companies. With real-time insurance rates online, consumers are able to receive quotes from many insurance companies at the same time. A quote from their website says: “In an age of fast everything, you can now get fast auto insurance. When you request a quote from CarInsurance.com, after answering a few simple questions you can instantly get a quote from multiple companies.” As an added incentive, persons are able to purchase their insurance online in some states. In line with this, their website further states: “Once you select a company, we will ask more detailed questions in each category, pull any underwriting reports and supply you with a final verified, accurate rate. You can then purchase online or call our call center to complete the policy and print your proof of insurance.”

So CarInsurance.com, through its flagship unit Progressive Direct is truly what the doctor ordered. Now you can save time and money by purchasing insurance for your car online, no matter the time of day or night.