PageOnce – Your Online Personal Assistant

PageOnce describes itself as a virtual personal assistant, and that’s just what it offers. The concept is simple. It’s a single page where you can manage almost every part of your online life, whether that’s social, shopping or financial. It only takes a few minutes to start using PageOnce. When you’re signed in you can start adding accounts in one of six categories: finance, shopping, utilities, social, travel, and email. Clicking on the section gives you a list of the most common service providers, and you also have the option to add your own. Just input your account name, username and password and that account is added to your start page.

The PageOnce start page looks and feels like a regular internet start page on Netvibes or IGoogle, but it offers so much more. With those start pages, you need to leave the site to interact with your data. As an example, you can view a summary of your minutes used with many wireless providers. PageOnce enables you to see your private information, which is much more useful. It’s great to be able to see your email summaries and decide whether or not you need to login and actually begin processing these messages. But when you’re ready, the login process is also handled by PageOnce, so it effectively functions as a password manager. If you want a single interface to manage your travel arrangements, shopping lists, banking and social networking profiles, then this is a great place to start. And with an extraordinary level of data encryption, PageOnce affirms that your data is secure.

Practical Uses

• Keep track of when your utility bill payments are due to avoid any late fees
• Develop a clear picture of your financial life by managing credit cards, bank accounts and investments in one place
• Check out the latest bestsellers on Amazon and see if you have enough money to order them
• Avoid duplicating purchases by tracking your online shopping for multiple sites

Insider Tips

• Change your passwords on other websites to more complex ones and mange them from PageOnce, increasing your internet security
• Get real-time travel alerts when you incorporate your travel services into PageOnce
• Look at the update feeds in the top left corner of your page to see a snapshot of updates for the current day

What We Liked

• It was easy to add accounts to PageOnce and the information updated almost immediately
• The recommendations panel suggests sites that you might like to add to your page
• PageOnce delivers exactly what it promises: a one page snapshot of your online life

What We Didn’t Like

• Despite PageOnce’s assurances, adding sensitive financial data still feels uncomfortable
• The page layout is not customizable; this would have been a great feature
• Given the method PageOnce uses to capture data, adding some accounts can be buggy

Alternatives

• There are no direct competitors. Internet start pages offer some of the same functionality, as do financial management sites such as Mint.com

Company Info

• Launched: May 2007
• Privately held
• Headquarters: Palo Alto, CA
• Founded by: Ahikam Kaufman and Guy Goldstein
• Website: http://www.pageonce.com

Costs

• Free

Rating

• 4 out of 5 (great)