Earlier today, VentureBeat detailed a major Blippy privacy breach that exposed user credit card information to search engines. The breach appears to have occurred on a small scale — Blippy believes that only four users had their credit cards compromised — but the fact that it happened at all is unsettling. After all, Blippy’s service asks users to entrust it with their credit card information (and in some cases, their credentials for online services) — it is of paramount importance that Blippy keep that data secure.
In an official response, the company says it isn’t as bad as it looks and doesn’t affect current users, explaining that it affected four early beta users, specifically those whose credit cards include their credit card numbers as part of a transaction’s “Raw Data”. → Read More
As we first reported last month, Blippy has raised another round of funding. Following the initial $1.6 million angel round in January, the controversial service has just raised another $11.2 million.
As we expected, the latest round was led by August Capital and partner David Hornik will join Blippy’s board. Humorously, Hornik shared his investment on Blippy itself, so we know he put in about $8 million 8 days ago (it was hidden until just now). “I think this is my biggest purchase on Blippy,” Hornik quipped. The rest of the money is from Charles River Ventures, which had led the angel round. → Read More
Early this year, Blippy, the highly controversial startup that lets you share your credit card and online purchases with your friends, ran into some trouble with Amazon.com. Namely, Amazon told Blippy to stop pulling in user purchase information, and to go back and erase all existing data they’d already sucked in. Today, Blippy users have regained the ability to share their Amazon purchases, but this time, Blippy doesn’t need Amazon’s permission.
The new Amazon integration requires users to grant Blippy access to their Gmail accounts via OAuth (this only works with Gmail, though the site says it plans to support other email services soon). After linking your Gmail to Blippy, the service will automatically scan your account for Amazon receipts, which it will use to display the items you’ve purchased in your Blippy feed. When I asked Blippy co-founder Philip Kaplan if they had Amazon’s approval, he said they didn’t ask for it, and they weren’t sure they needed it, either. → Read More
Blippy is always fun to write about because so many people are enraged by its very existence. But all that rage apparently hasn’t stopped the company from getting lots of investor attention. In addition to landing a bevy of top tier angels and venture capitalists in their first round of financing, we’ve now heard that Blippy is preparing to close on a new round.
August Capital partner David Hornik is leading the round. And the valuation is “totally absurd” says one source. Another puts it at $50 million, although that may be a little on the high side. Regardless, that’s not bad for a site which only launched publicly two months ago. Update: Yet another source says “high 30s” on valuation, and we think that’s about right.
Blippy wouldn’t comment on this story. I reached David Hornik (he seemed to regret having answered the phone). All that he’d say is that he loves Blippy, but he would neither confirm nor deny an investment. → Read More
When Blippy launched a few months ago, the idea was to get the site up there as bare-bones as possible so it was simple to people. That makes sense since the idea of sharing your credit card transaction data was (and remains) highly controversial. But despite the controversy, users have embraced Blippy. So now it’s time to give it a fresh coat of paint — and a new privacy feature.
Today, Blippy has undergone a massive redesign. Previously, Blippy was a stream of your friends’ transactions and little else. Now, it’s much more robust. In fact, it looks very similar to the most recent redesign of Facebook. You’ll notice the new update indicators next to the logo that get badged with a number when there is an update. You’ll also notice a search box front and center (for now, this is only to search for businesses or users). → Read More
Blippy, the Twitter-like service that lets users publish the details of all their purchases, is just a couple of months old. But it already got Stephen Colbert’s attention (thumbs up). And now it has Amazon’s too (thumbs down).
Cofounder Philip Kaplan first mentioned that Amazon had turned off Blippy’s access to the service on an episode of TWiST with Jason Calacanis. I spoke to Kaplan tonight about Amazon’s reaction to Blippy. → Read More
Normally, it takes quite a bit of time before a startup gets any sort of mainstream spotlight. That’s not the case with Blippy.
Tonight, the controversial social credit card data aggregator was featured on Comedy Central’s Colbert Report. As you might imagine, host Stephen Colbert ripped into the service’s ability to show everyday purchases at places such as Wendy’s. → Read More
Readers seem pretty split about what to think of Blippy, the service which allows you to share your credit card purchases online. About half think it’s the next logical step in sharing data online. The other half think it’s just about the worst idea ever. Retailers, it seems, are starting to lean towards the former.
Blipply has reached agreements with three partners to promote and use Blippy on their sites: Woot, Groupon, and Overstock.com. The latter is particularly interesting because as you may remember, Overstock.com was an initial Facebook Beacon partner — something which caused some controversy, and caused the company to pull away from Beacon. Now, they appear ready to revisit the idea. → Read More
People love Blippy. Well, they love to talk about Blippy. And complain about it. And argue that it’s the end of privacy as we know it. But some people do actually love Blippy, the service which lets you share you credit card transactions with the world. In fact, a number of investors do, as the service has just raised a $1.6 million round of funding.
The large angel round was led by Charles River Ventures. Also participating are Sequoia Capital, Evan Williams, Jason Calacanis, James Hong, Ariel Poler, and Ron Conway. A pretty impressive list.
Blippy co-founder Philip Kaplan is also putting his money where his mouth is and investing. The fact that Charles River Ventures is leading the round should surprise no one since Kaplan left his role there as an Entrepreneur In Residence to help launch Blippy. CRV’s Saar Gur is also taking a seat on Blippy’s board. → Read More
In 2004 everyone freaked out when Gmail launched because Google would be reading your emails to figure out what ads to serve you. “Privacy advocates objected to the advertising model, which involves Google’s robot eyes scanning every e-mail for keywords and displaying contextual advertisements alongside a user’s inbox,” noted Wired.
That might sound familiar to your great-great-great grandparents. Supposedly many people were apprehensive about using telephones in the early 1900s because they knew the phone companies could listen in on their phone calls. There are people who won’t use phones today because of the ease in which calls can be tapped.
But the rest of us seem to be ok with Gmail. And our phone. That’s because the benefits of those products far outweigh the privacy costs. And people are going to be just fine with Facebook, too. Even if they did do a switcharoo on privacy settings a month ago that is still reverberating through the tech press.
Contrary to published reports, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg did not say “the age of privacy is over” in my interview with him last Friday evening at the Crunchies. You can watch the video here for yourself. What he said is that he wants Facebook to change with its users, and keep its product fresh. Which is exactly what they are doing. → Read More
As the Web becomes more social, privacy becomes harder and harder to come by. People are over-sharing on Facebook and Twitter, broadcasting their whereabouts every ten steps on Foursquare and Gowalla, and uploading photos and videos of their most private moments to the Web for all to see. It’s easy to say that privacy is dead, we all live in public now, and just deal with it.
But things are a bit more complicated. It used to be that we lived in private and chose to make parts of our lives public. Now that is being turned on its head. We live in public, like the movie says (except via micro-signals not 24-7 video self-surveillance), and choose what parts of our lives to keep private. Public is the new default. → Read More
Yesterday, Blippy opened its doors beyond a private group of users it had been testing with. Their invites went quickly (we have more below), and despite the obviously controversial idea of opening your credit card purchasing data to your social graph, a lot of users jumped in and started sharing data. So many, in fact, that Blippy is already tracking well over $1 million in sales, we’re told.
Obviously, that’s a big difference from Blippy actually making $1 million, but eventually, that’s the idea. Still, the fact that users are willing to show off about 25,000 different purchases on the service shows that not everyone is so opposed to the idea. → Read More
A couple weeks ago, when we wrote about Blippy, the new startup that allows you to share your credit card purchases online, it caused quite a bit of controversy. That was expected. Sometimes good ideas do. Sometimes bad ideas do. So which one is Blippy? Well, why don’t find out for yourself?
The company has given us 250 invites to give away to TechCrunch readers. Even if you hate the idea, you should sign up to “if nothing else, reserve your favorite username now, before it’s taken,” co-founder Philip Kaplan says in a message to you, the readers. He also notes that you can easily choose just to share certain things, like your Zappos purchases, for example. That’s exactly what Michael is doing. Or you might want to only share your Amazon purchases. That’s exactly what Sarah is doing. Me? I’m sharing pretty much everything. Because I have nothing to hide. At least not on this credit card. → Read More
As the Internet matures, slowly but surely everything we do in the real world is going social. But there’s a limit to how much information we can explicitly share on all the various services. A new service, Blippy, launching today in private beta, has an interesting way to take something you do everyday, buy things with your credit card, and automatically push those transactions online for others to see and interact with.
Yes, I know this is a controversial idea — that’s part of what makes it potentially a great one. Imagine being able to see everything your friends buy with a credit card as they do it. This not only tells you what kind of things they’re actually into (rather than someone just saying they like something), but also other information like how cheap they are, as well as where they actually are at a given time. There is actually a lot of data tied into the transactions we make, and Blippy takes that and makes it social. → Read More
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