Besides the 256-bit AES encryption that is always on your wallet, the best assurance I can offer about Ilium Software is that we’ve been at this for over 11 years now and we’ve been extremely successful. On top of that, major corporations have tied their names to ours, including HTC, Microsoft, and HP. These guys don’t go into these sorts of relationships lightly. What their partners do can have a significant impact on their success.

Hopefully this will help a bit as you make your decisions about who to trust!

Thanks for the whole post for me! I’ve been in circumstances where my laptop has died and I can’t get internet on my iphone, but I can use a 3rd parties PC.

That’s meant typing in URL’s and paswords and that is error prone and long.

This is therefore one app that I would be happy to pay a (modest!) fee.

One request: could we have an auto-sync facility, using a either a scheduled sync time or an event trigger?

Good luck and thanks for the info.

As for web apps – it just depends. Some really are designed to be mainly used while you’re in one location and those can be cool. A lot of the better ones have some basic offline functionality. It just depends on the app. While I generally like the idea of having my data always available, I can see a lot of benefits of having someone else maintain the infrastructure and worry about penetration testing. I know that I personally don’t have the knowledge to adequately secure any server I would put online so am quite glad to leave that to professionals.

Sounds cool, though, so I’ll have to really start looking at it soon.

Great feedback Charles. We are very aware of the problems you speak of. One thing we’ve already done is allowed eWallet to sync to pretty much ANYWHERE. Right now a user can sync to pretty much anywhere they like, including across the web. The key difference between this and the EWC is that we’re offering a tool that lets you access and edit your applications from an online portal.

My philosophy on web apps is this – I see them as a companion to on-device applications, not a replacement. I know others disagree but in the end, when it comes to information and applications you REALLY care about – there is no substitute for an “always up” “always connected” on-device app. Having spent a week trying to function 100% wireless in San Francisco last week, I can assure you – the world is NOT ready for 100% wireless solutions.

To that end, anything we do with eWallet Web Companion will be treated like an extension of the existing software feature set, rather than a distinct change from what we’re doing now.

The key advantage is that it allows eWallet users to continue to access their data, even if they have a device we simply can’t afford to support or haven’t supported yet. Symbian is a great example – Symbian is one of the most broadly used operating systems out there but Symbian users don’t by software. Why? Who knows. It isn’t really important since we aren’t going to change that about the user base. Rather, we can at least ALLOW those eWallet users who happen to be carrying a Symbian phone to get to their important information. All you info, all the time. A pretty cool goal.

It’s seems that many of the offering for the Palm Pre are going to be SaaS but it gets a bit much if I’m going to be paying out for palm on-line desktop, documents to go online, ewallet on a subscription basis.

Where there are natural complementary services, you guys should look at operating joint portals and increase the value proposition to the consumers.

If not, I think most consumers will just “cheat” and use services like live mesh to sync across the web and to their machines (E-wallet works perfectly if you are interested to know).

Best

Charles Knight