PageOnce to Put All Your Online Accounts in One Place
Posted by lesmuise on March 3, 2008
Mark Hendrickson 47 comments »
Go to PageOnce
Personal content aggregators are nothing new. We recently covered the latest of many services that consolidate your social networking activity into one place. But PageOnce, a company that was on this year’s Israel Web Tour, wants to become the one stop shop for all your web-accessible accounts.
The site is still in private beta and working to expand the number of account types that it supports (TC readers can sign up here). However, you can already use the service to retrieve information from many banking, social networking, airline, email, and shopping accounts such as Citibank, Facebook, American Airlines, Gmail, and Amazon. PageOnce takes the information appropriate to each account (once you give it your username and password, of course) and displays it in a Netvibes
/PageFlakes
-like layout. If you have lots of accounts to manage, you can choose to view them according to type (finance, shopping, utilities, etc.).
Despite the fact that PageOnce needs to build relationships with many of the account providers in order to retrieve information from them (not everyone has an API like Facebook after all), the company has done a good job digesting information for at-a-glance presentations from a fairly wide range of providers. The “fetch once” technology behind the site, however, only pulls information from elsewhere; it doesn’t push information back, so you can’t actually make changes to your bank account while on PageOnce; you’ll need to follow links to the bank’s website itself.
PageOnce is definitely onto a good idea here, and I particularly like being able to check all my accounts without having to reenter usernames and passwords for each. However, I wonder whether a more established personalized homepage provider like Netvibes won’t swoop in and steal PageOnce’s thunder. Netvibes is already a great place to retrieve information from various web services and RSS feeds. It wouldn’t be a huge leap for them to provide widgets that could display information from a much wider range of personal accounts as well. And in fact, when I asked Netvibe’s founder Tariq Krim whether they planned to provide this functionality, he said that Netvibes is already discussing the possibility with several account providers supported by PageOnce.
PageOnce seems to have the leg up since they’ve already proven that they can aggregate this sort of information. But since they rely on their own efforts to expand support for an inexhaustible number of accounts, a more decentralized approach with Netvibes as the focal point and account providers as the widget developers themselves could win out in the long run.
Website:
www.pageonce.com
Location:
Palo Alto, California, United States
Founded:
May 1, 2007
Funding:
$1.5M
PageOnce, a stealthy start-up, is developing an internet “assistant” that will both help consumers manage their online lives, and marketers connect with those same consumers.
The company plans to unify information from the diverse internet… Learn More
Website:
www.netvibes.com/
Location:
Paris, France
Founded:
September 1, 2005
Funding:
$16M
Netvibes is one of the pioneers of the personalized home page. Netvibes lets you assemble all your favorite widgets, feeds, social networks, email, videos and blogs on one fully-customizable page. , Netvibes recently introduced a pre-beta version of… Learn More
Website:
www.pageflakes.com/
Location:
San Francisco, California, United States
Founded:
January 1, 2006
Pageflakes is a personalized Ajax home page service with key features being customized widgets, an RSS reader and group sharing capabilities. Pageflakes allows you to put all your web favorites, including news, email and search engines, onto one… Learn More
Information provided by CrunchBase
