My dear friends, I would like to ask for your opinion and insight about my new iPhone application and the startup around it.
The app normally costs $10 but it would be silly to expect people to pay that much for the privilege of reviewing it 
so I dropped price to zero till August 11th. App Store has no discount or coupon system so timing is the only thing I could control. In return I hope to get one thing: feedback. If you have suggestion or thoughts fell free to use the thread on news.yc or on this blog. Or you can leave a comment in the App Store where more people could find it.
Proceed over here to get started.
So what does our app do? It stores passwords, encrypted, on the iPhone. This way you trade “many things I must remember” for “one things I must remember”. It’s a good trade we reckon. In addition it can optionally sync the same data (while still encrypted) to our server and then view/edit it over at http://www.memengo.com. We do AES-256 encryption (including within AJAX web app) so clear-text data never leaves your possession.
As a result you maintain control over your data – if you lose the phone (or someone steals our servers) the data is still encrypted, you don’t really lose the access to the data because there is more than one copy and you can access your data from any modern web browsers or from your iPhone. That’s the value prop – your data is within your reach.
Our business model so far is to sell iPhone application and provide online service as a free add-on. We still consider other alternatives, so if anyone’s been in the same boat please share your insight. If there is interest in our technology stack or any other questions, just ask.
August 10, 2008 at 7:56 am |
Great app. But i am concerned…
how do i know you are not a scam website trying to get access to all my passwords? You don’t even have a phone number, contact name etc etc where we can verify that you are not a company running out of eastern Europe who will steal my id.
August 10, 2008 at 3:04 pm |
Hi, Sam!
The issue of trust is inevitable, but hard to resolve.
Memengo, Inc. is a Washington-based corporation, you can see our record with Secretary of State at
http://www.secstate.wa.gov/corps/search_detail.aspx?ubi=602803813
One thing that could help is the fact that Apple verified our corporate identity (including our Articles of Incorporation as filed with Secretary of State of Washington) before allowing us into the app store.
Ours is a very small business, so we don’t have anyone to man the phones and we don’t have a physical address to conduct busciness at.
I should probably put my name and bio up somehwere on the web site, hopefully that would help. We’re also considering BBB membership, but it’s not clear yet if we can justify the expense.
Thanks for bringing this up, I should go update our FAQ pages.
August 11, 2008 at 11:19 am |
Desktop application as an alternative/complement your web service.
September 17, 2008 at 8:50 am |
Here’s an idea. As an alternative, to deal with the security issue. Do what TODO and NOTEBOOK do and offer sync options to other online services. Maybe Google Docs/Forms/Sheets support, so all your custom fields are kept and data is now optionally stored by a third-party. Another way to do it, is to allow FTP storage to an encrypted file that can be decrypted with third-party tools (RAR/ZIP?) for recovery/editing. People can then store on their own server.
September 18, 2008 at 9:44 am |
Thanks Rick, we’re thinking about this sort of options.