Webware

Updated 10/20/08 with a product download link.

I just demoed the prerelease version of Pageonce for BlackBerry, an app that will help track your personal finance and other online accounts.

For those of you unfamiliar with the product of which I speak, Pageonce (covered here and here) is a one stop shop for accessing all your online accounts from your mobile phone (as of today that's just the iPhone).

You sign up for an account online and begin filing the details for any number of personal accounts. There are templates you can choose by category, such as airlines for travel, Netflix and Amazon for entertainment, and, of course, your banking and credit card accounts. If your account type isn't there, you can add it in by hand.

After the initial setup, which can take some time if there are a lot of accounts you'd like to track, you'll be able to sign in from the BlackBerry to view your transactions, credit limits, and balance statements chronologically or by individual account.

Keep tabs on your cumulative spending.

(Credit: Pageonce)

If all this inputting of personal details sounds a little scary--after all, who would lightly enter their financial information anywhere?--keep in mind that Pageonce is shielded by 256-bit encryption and that Pageonce sends you e-mail alerts of suspicious activity if you or someone claiming to be you spends above your usual levels.

In the Advanced Security tab on BlackBerry, you'll also be able to lock Pageonce to your specific device. If anyone tries logging on from another device, your account will be deactivated to keep your information secure. If you're sharing financial information with someone else, however--a spouse, perhaps--Pageonce does support simultaneous sign-ins, so you can both track your cumulative spending, stock portfolio, and due dates for your next bill.

Pageonce is a much prettier and more functional app on the iPhone, however it proves fast and easy to use on the BlackBerry. Pageonce is currently free of charge and free of advertisements, though CEO Guy Goldstein confirms that banner ads will soon premiere for both platforms. Goldstein is also toying with the idea of making Pageonce for BlackBerry a premium product in the future, so you'd best get to downloading while the downloading is good and free.

While I am personally slow to share my bank account numbers and other sensitive data, those with more expansive comfort zones will find Pageonce a useful tool, especially if you travel often and have limited opportunities to check your statements online.

You can download Pageonce for BlackBerry by pointing your mobile browser to www.m.pageonce.com.

Personal organizer PageOnce has a great iPhone application that I think many will find to be incredibly useful. Like its desktop sibling, PageOnce for iPhone is a feed aggregator the likes of Netvibes or MyYahoo. The only difference is that you're feeding it account information for utilities and services to get a quick overall view of your various balances and spending activity.

I've been using the application for the past few days, and have come to rely on it almost exclusively to keep track of bank accounts, mobile phone usage, and my Netflix queue. In fact, it's currently the only way to track your Netflix account short of visiting Netflix.com or another Web-based queue manager in Safari (although this is coming soon), but will do far more if you're willing to spend the time plugging in all your accounts.

PageOnce for the iPhone keeps each feed in its own container and opens it up like a nice large pop-up that can be scrolled through and dismissed with a quick touch on the screen. You can see all types of accounts that have been up through PageOnce on the Web. Missing, however, is a way to add new accounts from your phone. This will hopefully make it in later editions.

Privacy nuts should be a little wary of putting this much of their personal login information in the cloud, but the good news is the application can be set to forget your password every time you exit, keeping it safe if your phone is lost or stolen. Also, as mentioned in previous coverage, PageOnce uses bank-level security to keep accounts from being hacked.

Below is a demo of PageOnce for the iPhone and iPod Touch in action.

Pageonce, which bills itself as a personal Internet assistant, has entered its public beta phase. (We covered its February debut here.)

The service lets users aggregate all of their Web accounts from a single dashboard. Users submit their user names and passwords for services, including finance, shopping, utilities, social networks, travel, and e-mail, into a Pageonce master account. After the accounts are activated, Pageonce can let users know how many minutes they have left on their cell phone account, and send notifications about flight itinerary changes, credit limits, friend request, bill payments, and other account activities. Pageonce also provides a proactive function, making it easy for users to monitor their accounts for fraudulent activity. A version of the Pageonce for the iPhone is also in development.

Pageonce provides a dashboard and notifications of changes in accounts.

The utility of Pageonce is obvious, but it requires a level of trust for users to give up their access information to a single Internet service. Pageonce applies military-level security, Pageonce CEO Guy Goldstein told me, with multiple security layers, including 256-bit data encryption, SSL systems, and multiple firewalls. "All the data is encrypted, and we have hired hackers to try to break into our systems," Goldstein said. Financial accounts are read-only, so from the Pageonce site a user's accounts cannot be changed. Goldstein said Pageonce is also looking into token-based security solutions to provide great security assurance to users. Even with all the assurances of security, Pageonce must overcome a trust perception hurdle to gain acceptance.

Prior to the public beta, Pageonce had 20,000 users and 60,000 accounts. The majority of the accounts cover e-mail, financial services, and social networks so far. The company plans to generate revenue from advertising, primarily via customer retention promotions, which represents about half the marketing spend at most consumer companies. Anonymized benchmarking data could also provide another revenue source.

Pageonce was founded by ex-Mercury (sold to Hewlett-Packard for $4.5 billion) executives and is planning a Series A investment round. The company was private funded with $1.5 million in May 2007.

PageOnce is a very new take on an old idea. Take your standard widget-based feed reader such as Pageflakes or Netvibes and replace its blog and RSS feed widgets with financial tracking tools to let you keep an eye on bank accounts, credit card transactions, and various bills. It promises to offer you all the things you love about accessing your private personal information, while presenting it like you're scoping out your favorite feeds about gadgets and odd news.

One of PageOnce's best features is that it's very fast, and makes it easy to get going. There's a directory of pre-existing services to choose from, and if you come across one that's not listed you can send in a request for it to be added. I very easily found my bank, phone provider, and various credit card accounts. It also let me add things such as my Facebook news feed, Netflix queue, and mileage number from my airline--something I don't really need to check on a daily basis, but why not add it, right?

Besides the usual social stuff and e-mail accounts, you can also keep an eye on financial data from various bank accounts, credit cards, and billing services (not pictured).

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Like the service's namesake would suggest, all this action takes place on one page, but you can also cycle through the six major categories (finance, shopping, e-mail, etc.) as you would using self-created tabs on other customizable start pages. The added benefit of going to each of these specialized pages is that the widgets are larger and contain their entire set of data instead of just a brief overview. This was especially useful for my cellular phone bill, which offered up a forecast of how many minutes I was on track to using by the end of the billing cycle, something my carrier doesn't even offer on its billing pages. On the other hand, you can't reorder what's on any of the pages, which is incredibly useful, and will hopefully be added in later versions.

My one reservation with using services like this, and others that deal with financial data (see Mint and Wesabe) are that they just freak me out. There's just something about giving a third party service so much of my personal financial information, that it doesn't matter how secure it is, or how much the data is anonymized on the way there. That said, PageOnce uses a variety of bank-level security measures to keep your data safe including high-level encryption, SSL, firewalls, and vulnerability tests from third party security consulting agencies.

The service is currently in private beta, although we've got 500 invites that have been made available to Webware readers. You can get yours by going here.

[Thanks to Webware reader Kyle for the tip] ... Read more