"A Providence, R.I., company has a similar idea. It’s called Swipely and is led by Netscape and TellMe veteran Angus Davis. That site is still in private beta, so there’s no way to know how it will distinguish itself from Blippy, although Mr. Davis promises 'a real service that my mom and millions of people can use every day to improve their lives.'"Warning: The 'Dot.com 2.0 Bubble' is about to burst.
It looks like you're buying a coffee at Starbucks.
Would you like to:
() Buy a coffee
() Publish Mastercard Number on Internetgraventy: Who wants people knowing their credit card purchases?There's a scene in the dystopian nightmare of Brazil in which a jackbooted-thug-with-a-heart-of-gold counsels a victim of imminent state-sanctioned torture, saying: "Don't fight it son. Confess quickly! If you hold out too long you could jeopardize your credit rating!"
samstrong77 just bought DIAPERS at CVS
In a phone interview Friday morning, Blippy’s co-founder, Philip Kaplan, said the card numbers in question belonged to four Blippy users. He explained that when people link their credit cards to Blippy, merchants pass along their raw transaction data - including some credit card numbers - and the site scrubs that information to present just the merchant and the dollar amount spent. But several months ago, when Blippy was being publicly tested, that raw transaction data was present in the site’s HTML code, where it was retrieved by Google.The Man Is A Master of Understatement.
Mr. Kaplan said that early on, Blippy started disguising the raw transaction data behind the scenes, but it did not know about the breach until today. He added, “This still looks pretty bad."
"A darling of the technology and investment worlds, Blippy signed up the tech elite overnight, and raised $11 million in short order. Today after the privacy breach, people are publicly writing the company off. They broke the trust that made thew whole idea feasible, so the logic goes."A darling of the technology and investment worlds..." Really?
After reading what actually happened, I think that any level-headed observer can say this: if Blippy was a good idea a week ago, it still is today after the leak.
Blippy is being run by some of the smartest folks online, including everyone’s favorite Phillip “Pud” Kaplan, who has a special place in bloggers’ hearts for past written works. The company has solid investors, an interesting (some say innovative) product, and they (were) growing like a weed."
Leaving Minnesota for Colorado, I decide to make a stop at one of those rest areas on the side of the road. I go in the washroom. The first stall was taken so I went in the second stall. I just sat down when I hear a voice from the next stall: "Hi there, how is it going?"posted by ericb at 12:36 PM on April 23, 2010 [2 favorites]
Okay, I am not the type to strike conversations with strangers in washrooms on the side of the road. I didn't know what to say so finally I say: "Not bad..."
Then the voice says: "So, what are you doing?"
I am starting to find that a bit weird, but I say: "Well, I'm going back to Colorado..."
Then I hear the person say all flustered: "Look I'll call you back, every time I ask you a question this idiot in the next stall keeps answering me."*
"A lawyer who talked to VentureBeat on background — that’s reporter-speak for 'he doesn’t want us to use his name' — thinks that Blippy needs to prepare for a pile-on of opportunists, government regulators, and just-plain-mad customers.posted by ericb at 6:49 PM on April 23, 2010
...Blippy’s biggest worry may be that the company has failed to comply with Federal Trade Commission rules on protecting customer privacy.
'Noncompliance could open a company up to an FTC law enforcement action,' our lawyer source said, 'including civil penalties and injunctive relief,' which means the company could be ordered to pay fines, or to perform actions that range all the way up to going out of business. In 2000, a judge ordered file-sharing service Napster to shut down.
Also, in America consumers are also allowed to separately sue businesses that don’t comply with the law. They can collect payments both for perceived damages, and to cover their own attorney’s fees. Now that it’s widely known the company has recently closed $11.2 million in funding, the odds are higher than before that lawyers will look for ways to sue."*
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*amazon.com . . . create new account*
posted by Think_Long at 9:27 AM on April 23, 2010