Certify.com is a company that focuses on expense management which has just raised $1.9 million from angel investors. The angel investors include Esther Dyson and former TD BankNorth CEO William Ryan. Certify.com sells portable scanners for $139 that will automatically upload receipts to your Certify Wallet e-mail address. The company also has an iPhone application that gets added to your Certify Wallet once you e-mail the picture to data@certify.com.
For individuals, having a Certify Wallet costs $5 per month. Corporate plans have a variety of options. The corporate expense manager has a dashboard in order to track the analytics around the receipts. These services are especially useful for those who spend a great deal of time traveling around for company purposes. I would not be surprised if major consulting firms pick up on using this service soon.
At the beginning of the year, Facebook filed a complaint against Power.com accusing them of copyright and trademark infringement and unlawful competition. Power.com was attempting to act as an aggregated social network where users can enter login information for MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, Hi5, Orkut, and Facebook and all of their contact information would be updated at once amongst all the networks.
Facebook blocked access and sued them in January as a result. Now Power.com has responded with their own lawsuit alleging that Facebook is trying to monopolize the social networking industry.
Power.com started in Brazil and tried to capture the U.S. audience this past December with help from investors such as DFJ and Esther Dyson. Power.com wanted “to be the center of the world” according to CEO Steve Vachani. Power.com has a huge spike in traffic, but then it died out.
At one point there was 8 million users and just last month there were only 14,000 U.S. users that visited their website according to analytics web company Compete.com. Power.com claims that they received 250,000 unique visitors in the U.S. last month.
Power.com stated that Facebook is stifling competition by blocking access to their service. But Facebook made a statement saying that they made many attempts to work with Power.com but claims that they continued to put user data at risk.
