By now, you’ve probably heard that West Virginia may ban Google Glass use while driving, and it might just be on to something given those snowy mountain roads.

The piece of legislation proposed by Gary Howell, a Republican from Mineral County in the West Virginia House of Delegates, would ban drivers from wearing Google Glass while on the road. He equates its multitasking features, such as text messaging and Internet connectivity, to using cellphones while driving — a practice that West Virginia and a number of other states have banned.

And yeah, as the video above demonstrates (and our own Jolie O’Dell attests to), West Virginia has some roads so scary that you probably don’t want blinking texts to distract you from.

Howell told CNET that he believes the government “has no business protecting us from ourselves,” though he does think it has a place making sure we don’t hurt others. Google Glass, he says, is just the right kind of distraction to get us in trouble.

The bill may very well not pass, however, and Howell says he’ll try again in 2014 if it fails. Then, he says, we’ll unfortunately have first-hand accounts of Google Glass causing accidents.

But while this may be a great piece of legislation for West Virginia, it might not be as pivotal for, say, Kansas:

hat tip Ars Technica; Google Glass image via Google

As of the first of the year, it is officially illegal to request a Facebook password when interviewing prospective employees in California. A pair of bills signed by Gov. Jerry Brown in September took effect on Tuesday.

Brown signed the Assembly Bill 1844 and Senate Bill 1349, which “prohibit universities and employers from demanding your email and social media passwords,” as Brown said on his Facebook page. Earlier in 2012, people began calling out interviewers and institutions for asking for Facebook passwords as part of the review process. The process of screening a prospective student’s or employee’s social media accounts to decide whether or not they’d be a good addition to the institution is not a new one. But at least with this process, people felt as if their private information was still sacred.

When employers and universities request passwords, however, people undoubtedly feel as if saying no is a red flag and hand over the credentials.

As Wired notes, six states total have adopted similar legislation, as there isn’t federal regulation banning the password-requesting process yet. The states that join California include Illinois, Delaware, Maryland, Michigan, and New Jersey.

At the time, Facebook quickly responded saying that it did not approve of employers asking for social-media passwords and noted that people agree in the terms of service not to give out that information.

“As a user, you shouldn’t be forced to share your private information and communications just to get a job. And as the friend of a user, you shouldn’t have to worry that your private information or communications will be revealed to someone you don’t know and didn’t intend to share with just because that user is looking for a job,” said Facebook chief privacy officer, policy Erin Egan in a blog post. “That’s why we’ve made it a violation of Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities to share or solicit a Facebook password.”

via Wired; Jerry Brown image via Jerry Brown 2010/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Dining out with friends is usually a pleasant experience — until the check comes. A startup called Foodivide just released a mobile app that makes it easier to settle restaurant tabs by providing bill-splitting tools.

Let’s say four people partook in a long leisurely meal together, with bottles of wine, shared appetizers, entrees, and a dessert or two for the table. One person only drank water, two people ordered steaks that out-cost the vegetarian options, and the diner on a diet abstained from chocolate cake.

Enter Foodivide.

Upon opening the app, every eater is given a plate icon to “drag and drop” the items they consumed. If three people shared a dish, a tap of the screen divides that amount three ways and then the smaller number can be dropped into the individual plates. Once everything is divvied up, each person has a final tally.

“My friends and I love going out to eat, but splitting a bill with a group of friends can be such a pain,” said founder Daniel Shein. “I wanted to create an app that would get this part over with as quickly as possible.”

According to a census study, over 45 million Americans eat out at least once a week and spend an average of $3,000 a year at restaurants.

Shein’s goal with Foodivide isn’t just to help friends divvy up bills. His ultimate vision is to use data collected through the app to provide greater insight into people’s eating habits. By keeping a log of food consumption and spending patterns, users will be able to see where their money goes.

“As soon as you start inputting, you create a history and a profile,” he said. “I want to present users with an interface for them to see ‘holy cow, I spent $1,000 on burgers and I don’t even like them that much’.

In the next iteration of the app, Shein is aiming for an integration with FourSquare, so rather than manually inputting item costs, diners can simply select the items from menus. This will also give restaurants insights about who their greatest customers are.

Dozens of food apps already exist, although most of them target other parts of the eating experience. GrubWithUs is a social networking centered around dining, Foodspotting focuses on sharing images of delicious dishes, and Zagat and UrbanSpoon offer recommendations and reviews. A few apps deal with paying the bill, like Tabbedout and Tipulator, but this is the first we’ve heard of that deals specifically with group dining scenarios.

Foodivide is the latest project of Shein, who has been developing mobile apps since 2005. He has founded a number of startups, created multiple popular apps like Lookator and SignMeOut, and was a finalist in last year’s Kind of Code contest.

Bills, invoices, and bank statements are straddling the online and paper worlds, making organizing finances a messy task. Finovera is launching today in an attempt to collect these bills and make people trust accounting in the cloud.

Consumers receive more than 15 billion bills and statements every year, but fewer than 5 percent of these statements are delivered electronically, founder Purna Pareek said on stage at DEMO Spring 2012 in Santa Clara, Calif., today. “This is a massive burden for consumers.”

Finovera users are able to connect their financial and utilities accounts to the service, even if those accounts don’t have an online counterpart. Finovera is able to grab statements from the past 12 months and give you an analysis of your spending. Should one of these accounts not be connected to the Web, Finovera will contact the institution and retrieve the statements for you. The company is focused on families, who often have a number of big receipts, tuition bills, credit card balances, and mortgage payments to organize.

Finovera founder Purna Pareek

Competitors such as Manilla and Doxo do exist, but they do not aggregate offline accounts. Pareek even goes so far as to say that his service and Mint are complementary because of Finovera’s ability to access institutions that don’t have an online presence.

What Finovera is really going up against is fear, however. Many people are still uncomfortable keeping all of their financial records completely online. The concerns are simple: What if there’s a power outage? What if Finovera is hacked? These questions will stand in the way of customer adoption.

A panel of experts, in a post-demonstration discussion, said that Finovera is tackling a big enough consumer problem that it could potentially standout from competitors with a single compelling feature or a fresh user experience. Plus, the company could get some lift and distribution if it were to form partnerships with bill providers, RightScale CEO Michael Crandell said.

The company was founded in 2011 and has thus far raised an undisclosed amount from its founders as well as angel investors. Finovera is located in Milpitas, Calif. and has six employees.

Finovera is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Cloud dollar signs image via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Pageonce, which helps manage financial accounts and bills through your smartphone, just announced that it has raised $15 million in a new round of funding.

It seems like the Palo Alto, Calif. company has become more focused over time. When it first launched a couple of years ago, Pageonce offered a centralized website for users’ online identity, allowing them to access all of their Web accounts in one place. Now it’s all about a mobile app that the company promises will become the “wallet of the future.”

With the Pageonce app, users can track all their money and bills, receive bill alerts, and get the big picture of all their transactions through reports. The current concept sounds similar to popular personal finance site Mint, but a spokesperson argued that the company “addresses a broader audience” because it’s “about simplifying money and bills for daily use for everyone, rather giving lots of granular details, budgeting and goals.”

The company has now raised $25 million. The round was led by new investor Morgenthaler Ventures, with participation from Pitango ventures and Pageonce’s chairman Liron Petrushka.

“The Pageonce ‘wallet’ is a natural mobile play and a great bet to be a financial services category leader,” said Morgenthaler partner Rebecca Lynn in a press release. “With over 4.5 million users, they have already demonstrated a knack for simplifying the complex task of managing money and bills for their users.”

Manilla is one of 53 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2011 event taking place this week in Palm Desert, Calif. After our selection, the companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Born out of one of the U.S. Postal Service’s biggest customers comes a threat that could speed the mailer’s inevitable death: Welcome Manilla, a startup backed by magazine publisher Hearst, which aims to put your bills online.

No, really. Online bill pay has been a pipe dream since before the Internet hit mainstream consciousness a decade and a half ago. From nascent 1990s-era dial-up services well into the broadband age, though, most consumers have opted to keep getting paper bills. If you’ve tried to pay a bill or update an account online, you know why: Banks, utilities, magazines and other bill-senders for the most part offer unnavigable Web 1.0 design nightmares and overkill security that makes remembering logins and passwords a headache.

Today at the DEMO Spring 2011 conference in Palm Desert, Calif., New York-based Manilla unveiled a service for managing household accounts. I’ve tried it, and it may just be sexy enough to get users to nail their mailbox closed for good.

Hearst digital executive George Kliavkoff, who’s been leading the startup as interim CEO after a career that’s included stints at RealNetworks, MLB Advanced Media, NBC, and online-video site Hulu, is similarly taken: He’s announcing today that he’s becoming the startup’s permanent CEO.

Here’s how Manilla works: You type in the name of a business. If Manilla recognizes it, you’re prompted to add your login credentials if you have them, or create an online account if not. (For businesses Manilla doesn’t know how to handle, it logs suggestions from users to add them.) Manilla then connects with the business, either through back-end server connections or by logging in on the user’s behalf, a process known either as “screen scraping” or “Web extraction” depending on who’s talking. It then displays reminders of upcoming bills and archives paid bills and other messages forever. And along the way, it quietly stops those paper bills from coming.

Yes, there are potential security concerns, but screen scraping has been practiced by similar account-aggregation sites for more than a decade and is now well-understood by most players. Manilla says it has a full-time employee devoted to security and good relationships with financial institutions. It may nevertheless have a challenge convincing mainstream consumers of the process’s safety.

I ran into trouble adding my Citibank accounts, but it turned out that was Citi’s fault, not Manilla’s, as the bank’s systems were experiencing outages. The main letdown was when I tried to add my magazine subscriptions. I subscribe to a half-dozen titles. Not a single one was connected with Manilla. Kliavkoff said his team is working on adding more.

My main complaint with the service is that it’s too secure. The signup process has persnickety requirements for passwords that I don’t believe add substantially to security while adding to user frustration. Recent research has shown that fussing over whether a password has capital letters or numbers doesn’t add substantially to security. Kliavkoff told me that this was a battle he lost with his security team. (George, let me give you the same advice I regularly dish out to my writers: Just win.)

The major win for me and Manilla came when I added my electricity and garbage bills. Since I was logged into those sites anyway — I rarely visit them, typically receiving a paper bill and then paying the bill online through my bank instead — I signed up for automatic payments. That, in turn, is how Manilla plans to make money.

Why is Hearst backing this mail-killing business, since — for now, at any rate — it sends magazines through the Postal Service? Along with those lucrative, ad-laden magazines, Hearst sends some 500 million pieces of transactional mail a year — bills and renewal notices, Kliavkoff explained. And that’s just one biller: Think of the bank and credit card statements, utility bills, and other account notices companies send out. A typical bill costs a company 73 cents to send.

Most account-aggregation sites make money by analyzing consumers’ spending and then suggesting that they switch to a cheaper provider. You can imagine why billers aren’t thrilled about sharing their customer relationships with those sites. Manilla doesn’t allow competitive offers on its site. Instead, it charges billers a small monthly fee for every user who switches from paper to online billing.

Kliavkoff expects to yield $2 to $3 in revenue a month from a typical Manilla user at very high margins. He wouldn’t say exactly how much he aims to charge billers, but based on some other estimates he provided, I believe it’s somewhere between a nickel and a dime per user per month. Comcast and Citibank have agreed to come on board, he told me.

Currently, Manilla is owned 100 percent by Hearst. Kliavkoff wouldn’t say if he plans to raise outside money, but he points out that when he ran Hulu, its TV-network investors sold 10 percent of the company to Providence Equity Partners. I’ll read that as a statement that he’s open to taking someone’s money. In the meantime, I recommend that you sign up for Manilla and see who’s taking your money. You might save a few trees — and your sanity.

[Image via Ideasincirculation.com]