blippy

Blippy gets an API and a way to track groceries

SAN FRANCISCO--What a difference a few weeks can make.

At the Finovate conference, which is a biannual gathering of financial start-ups, Blippy co-founder Philip Kaplan put on a brave face, demoing new features and announcing that the service was launching an API for application developers. Kaplan's presentation came just a few weeks after it was discovered that the company had inadvertently leaked the credit card information of five of its users to Google's search engine.

However, privacy is still very much on the mind of the company, which posts details to its Web site about what purchases people … Read more

Blippy responds to credit card leak

Blippy, a social site focused on shopping, has pledged to take measures to avoid a repeat of the security failure that caused the credit card numbers of at least five users to appear in Google search results.

CEO and co-founder Ashvin Kumar apologized for the incident in his official blog on Monday. He also promised to revamp the site's security measures.

Kumar said he will hire a chief security officer and other staff to focus solely on the issue and will conduct regular security audits through third-party companies. He also pledged to invest in technology to filter out sensitive … Read more

The 404 567: Where we get caught playing with our toys (podcast)

Today's episode of The 404 Podcast resurrects our love for action figures and other toys from the late 1980s and early 1990s. Jeff's a little older than Wilson and me, but we can still bond over our mutual love for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figures and our mutual hatred for picking up all those foam Nerd darts.

There's also a lot to learn about each other based on our toys. For example, Wilson's mom used to yell at him for unscrewing and tinkering with all his figures, which explains why he eventually grew up building his own computers.

Unfortunately, we're too old to play with children's toys now so we've all graduated to big-boy toys, and it's with great sadness that we have to announce the death of the floppy disk. After three decades of production, Sony announced Friday that it would end all floppy-disk sales before the end of March 2011.

Many are unaware that Sony actually pioneered the first 3.5-inch floppy disk in 1981, although the 1.44MB disks were quickly rendered obsolete by other types of removable media like Zip disks, USB flash drives, and of course rewriteable CDs and DVDs. Stay tuned as we deliver a heartfelt "eugoogly" to the floppy disk--a close friend that saved kilobytes of data and served as the basis for way too many nerdy pickup lines.

It's no surprise that Internet privacy is a thing of the past, but a few Blippy users are still finding that out the hard way. If you've never heard of the site before, Blippy is a new company that lets you share your online purchases with everyone on a social network. The service gleans financial data, including what you bought and where you got it, and lets you compare your purchases with others at a granular level, all with the hopes of saving you a few bucks on future purchases.

Unfortunately, five Blippy users found their credit card information published in Google's search engine cache over the weekend. A rep from the company claims that a breach in two banks' security systems caused the problem and they've asked Google to reindex the entire site to fix it, but none of us really understand the appeal of Blippy- feel free to chime in if you're a user and let us know if you've stopped using the service after hearing about this breach in security.

EPISODE 567 Subscribe in iTunes audio | Suscribe to iTunes (video) | Subscribe in RSS Audio | Subscribe in RSS Video… Read more

Another Blippy credit card found in Google

Another credit card belonging to a Blippy user could be found in Google search Saturday, and the company said it had asked Google to re-index its entire site.

Silicon Alley Insider noticed that a site search of Blippy.com with the query "outstanding" turned up the debit card number of a Blippy user, a day after Blippy discovered that the credit card numbers of four Blippy users could be found via Google. Blippy inadvertently exposed the numbers to the public Internet in February, but did not realize the problem until Friday.

Blippy confirmed that a fifth user had … Read more

How Blippy users' credit cards got into Google

A series of gaffes at Blippy, Google, and a Midwest bank exposed the credit card numbers of four individuals within Google search results for more than two months.

Friday was easily the worst day in the history of Blippy, a young start-up that enables people to create social networks around sharing information on goods and services they buy. VentureBeat discovered that credit card numbers of four Blippy users could be found in Google's search index, and it published its findings in a story, forcing the start-up's three founders to scramble to repair the damage and get the numbers … Read more

Buzz Out Loud 1213: No iPad for you! (podcast)

Is this the ultimate early adopter penalty? If you buy more than two iPads to send to your friends overseas or give to your family, you risk a lifetime ban on future purchases? That just can't be right. Also not right: the sweet little child who calls tell us how to get porn on the iPhone. Just upsetting. Plus: Palm deathwatch and Facebook's privacy untangled (er, sort of).

Subscribe with iTunes (audio) Subscribe with iTunes (video) Subscribe with RSS (audio) Subscribe with RSS (video) EPISODE 1213

Lenovo interested in buying Palm http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTOE63M04J20100423 http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=33519… Read more

Blippy users' credit card info exposed on Google

People who use Blippy want to share information with friends about their online purchases, but some users found that the site was sharing a lot more than their purchases with a lot more than just their friends.

Credit card numbers for four Blippy users were found in Google search on Friday, Blippy co-founder Philip Kaplan acknowledged after VentureBeat reported on the data leak.

The problem stemmed from an oversight during the company's beta test months ago when Blippy didn't initially realize that raw credit card data was viewable in the HTML source of its pages, Kaplan said in … Read more

Why no one cares about privacy anymore

Google co-founder Sergey Brin adores the company's social network called Google Buzz. We know this because an engineer working five feet from Brin used Google Buzz to say so.

"I just finished eating dinner with Sergey and four other Buzz engineers in one of Google's cafes," engineer John Costigan wrote a day after the Twitter-and-Facebook-esque service was announced. "He was particularly impressed with the smooth launch and the great media response it generated."

You might call Brin's enthusiasm premature, especially since privacy criticisms prompted Google to make a series of quick changes a … Read more

Blippy launches the Twitter of personal finance

Blippy is one of those ideas that at first sounds so hilariously misguided that you'd be forgiven to think it a joke: It's a service that hooks into your credit card so everything you buy gets broadcast to your friends. Eventually you'll even be able to Twitter your spending. Ack!

Fortunately, the real story is more nuanced, more interesting, and more intelligent than you might think if all you read is the knee-jerk Twitter posts from people like me.

I talked today to Blippy co-founder Philip Kaplan about the service. He admits, "When we launched it, … Read more