A Personal Android App For The Agile Lifestyle


Our lives are moving faster than ever before. Who isn’t rushing around every day, desperately holding onto the one tool that unlocks everything about your life?  If you’re like me, your smartphone feels like an extension of your arm.

Our smartphones are as vital to our daily lives as a strong cup of coffee or a warm bed at night. Without them, we get nervous. How could we be disconnected from our text messages, Twitter, our games, our loved ones, our contacts, or our calendars for any length of time?!

We feel the same way about personal data. That’s why we’re making sure that your information is always at your fingertips with the launch of our Android app.

Personal on Android infographic

You’ve always been able to access your Personal data vault through the mobile web at personal.com, but now Android users can download our app in the Android Market and have secure, instant access to the most important details of your life.

With our app, you can enter info when you’re out on the town (like the fantastic wine that you’re enjoying with dinner) or always have access to the details you already saved in your vault, like your numerous passwords and logins.  And, you can share these gems back and forth with whomever you choose.

No more anxiety over finding the data you need, when you need it most. Our app provides a sense of confidence and what I call: “tech swagger.”  You now have the ability to securely and easily organize, search and control access to your digital information and online identity.

Make your life Personal.

Managing Your Online Identity


Do you present yourself differently on LinkedIn than you do on Facebook? How about on Amazon and when you walk into a store at the mall? What you reveal of yourself changes constantly depending on your context and who you are interacting with. We call that identity management.

Identity GemAs we launch Personal in open beta, we’ve taken a hard and long look at how to give our owners more control of their online identity. With your private, personal network, you have the ability to decide which parts of yourself to reveal when connecting with others. Currently, we don’t even allow people to search for you on Personal. Just connecting with another person in our system requires that you know his or her email address in advance.

Identity management starts with four basic features, and we’ll be adding many more regularly:

Username

Username will be how you are known in the system. Pick an anonymous username as you have many other chances to share your true identity if you choose. When connecting with others, only your username, along with your avatar if you add one, will be automatically revealed.

Personal Me Gem

This gem contains contains your actual name. If you decide to share it with someone in your network, you will be known to them personally (by name)!

Social Me Gem

Want to share your username and an alternative or anonymous picture?  This gem allows you to outside of Personal, or when publishing community gems.

Anonymous

We believe strongly in your right to remain anonymous when you choose. At present, we only support remaining anonymous when publishing community gems, but will be rolling out new anonymity features in the very near future.

We’re excited to hear what you think about these features when you get to try them out.  Feel free to send thoughts or questions to support@personal.com.

Jennifer

By Jennifer O'Keefe in Product

November 11, 2011

Are You Gemmin’?


The best part about interning at Personal is that you’re not confined to typical intern tasks. Personal is the kind of company that allows you to run with your ideas – especially the good ones.

One day, I was sitting at my desk and decided to create a video that would illustrate Personal in a fun and easy way to understand. The video illustrates the struggles of a person who doesn’t quite know what to do with all his data. He finally gets guidance from a friendly voiceover guy who explains about how Personal can help people manage their data overload.

And there you have it! Personal is easy to use and convenient. The only question you probably have now is: why haven’t you been gemmin’?

(If you want to share this video, here’s the link to embed it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MPLm9aHcUM)

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Adem

By Adem Gokturk in Product

August 4, 2011

Why We Started a Company Blog


Personal is on a mission to empower individuals with control over their data. In the process, we challenge the status quo, build new tools that better align with our values, and meet amazing people. One of our company principles is full transparency, so we started this blog to chronicle how, together with you, we’re going to change how the world works, one data point at a time.

There are so many musings that we’re bursting to share, but, to create some order in the chaos, we’re focused on four specific areas:

  1. Power Shift. This is where we’ll share our vision for a future built around Blogindividuals controlling the power and value of their personal data, instead of companies. We’ll also write about the latest policy, technology, private sector, and nonprofit developments affecting this historic opportunity.
  2. Product. Making data fun and interesting isn’t easy. Join us in a wide-ranging discussion on Personal’s platform, data vault and gems. Share your feedback and ideas, and react to new product announcements.
  3. Practical Tips. We’re tapping into our team and outside experts to share tips and how-to’s that help protect your personal data and privacy wherever you go online.
  4. Inside Personal. Building any fast growing company has its challenges. Add to that a big, disruptive model built on transparency and trust, and we think this is just too interesting to keep to ourselves. We’ll show you the “sausage making,” with a special focus on the hard choices we constantly face to enable a truly people-centric world to emerge.

Contributors come from across Personal and bring their unique perspectives. We’ll also have guest posts from some of the interesting people we get to work with outside of our company. If you like what you read here and would like to guest blog, we’d love to hear from you. Post a comment below!

Speaking of comments… We moderate comments to prevent bots from spamming us and filter out profanity. Our goal is to approve comments from real, live people within 24 hours or less. We encourage you to be as opinionated as you want to be. Just please — don’t curse and don’t be a robot.