EarthClassMail: Cyberbills & PayMyBills Take 2

Cyberbills, PayMyBills:

When a bill arrives, the user gets an e-mail notice. Reminders are sent by e-mail for unpaid bills that nearing their due date. A confirmation is sent by e-mail when a payment has been made.  

I am sure there are no security problems associated with EarthClassMail. None. What. So. Evah.

Update: changed to EarthClassMail as pointed out in comments.

Bye bye Web OS, hello Social OS

Man, I was just getting used to the idea of a Web OS and here I am faced with a new Social OS. How will I ever keep up? Damn you, Knowledge@Wharton.

Scrabulous and the New Social Operating System: How Facebook Gave Birth to an Industry

So many questions:

Is Facebook becoming the social operating system of the Internet, poised to support a whole new generation of businesses?

No.

Or is this new industry of applications leaning too heavily on the quixotic popularity of a single website?

Yes.

“There’s no question that social networking platforms will be the basis for a great deal of innovation and business opportunity,” says Kevin Werbach, professor of legal studies and business ethics at Wharton.

Sounds similar to Werbach’s introduction to Desktop.com in 2000:

Desktop.com and MyWebOS both promise not just specific applications, but entire OS-like environments via the Web.
…
It’s all but certain that there will be deals struck among the various Web-based app vendors, depending on where their products overlap. Beyond the actual functionality they offer, these startups will also differentiate themselves in their business models and market focus

Or, you know, die.

“I know so many venture capitalists and CEOs who play Scrabulous. It’s a new form of golf. Maybe you don’t have time to play nine holes, but you can socially interact and challenge one another via Scrabulous,” says Rumford, CEO of the Solana Beach, Calif.-based Gravitational Media and publisher of Facereviews.com, a review site for Facebook applications.

Gee, I wonder what other games VCs play online. Clearly, it’s one way to judge a successful business model. Didn’t a lot of VCs have Pointcast running on their PCs, too? Don’t Bill Gates and Warren Buffet play Bridge? Hmm, that gives me an idea.

For the moment, however, Wharton’s Fader sees Facebook commanding a mass market in a way traditional forms of media no longer do. “Even TV does not have the same level of engagement. Right now, Facebook is unique.”

I have seen that before:

According to the most recent Nielsen//NetRatings NetView figures, Friendster, a member community destination, attracted 927,000 visitors from home and work in October 2003. Those logging on to Friendster spent an average of one hour and fifty-one minutes on the site in October

I am bored. Let me log in and check if Bill and Warren are online.

George Ou uncovers a huge iPhone vulnerability

TUAW:

two New York truckdrivers and an accomplice decided the best way to easy money was to crack open a shipment of 300 iPhones bound for Hong Kong, pull the phones out of the bottom of the shipping crate, throw in some reams of paper for weight and then re-shrinkwrap the package for delivery.

Good job, George!

Chirp? Cuckoo

Honestly, WTF?

I predict they’ll retool this as a screensaver a la FlickrFan for HDTVs (and it’ll suck then, too).

Vista – the most secure OS

Wired:

 Based on the number of known vulnerabilities announced and the number of patches released for the desktop OS in the past year, Vista gets higher ratings than Windows XP, Mac OS X 10.4, Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Ubuntu 6.06. 

Assuming this is true, can someone tell me why hackers aren’t attacking the OS with the largest base? After all, Gates touted that Vista has sold more than 100M copies – repeated in today’s earnings report – and pundits all over insist that the reason OS X isn’t a target (but just as vulnerable) is because of relatively small installed base?

So, Vista is impenetrable, eh?