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By | December 4, 2006, 9:10am PST

Summary: I just had dinner with Dick Hardt of Sxip. He’s about to launch Sxipper, an open-source, "learning" version of those familiar adware wallet tools. This one will be a Firefox plug-in, coming out in a couple of weeks. It's free, but (natch) there's a charge for premium services. The basic idea is that you keep your [...]

I just had dinner with Dick Hardt of Sxip. He’s about to launch Sxipper, an open-source, "learning" version of those familiar adware wallet tools. This one will be a Firefox plug-in, coming out in a couple of weeks. It's free, but (natch) there's a charge for premium services.

The basic idea is that you keep your own personal data locally, stored in your browser (by the plug-in extension, actually). Meanwhile, Sxipper reads most Web fill-in-the-blanks forms and maps their fields onto your data. (Yes, you can have multiple personas for work/home addresses, etc.) But – as anyone who has used these tools knows – they often mess up, entering your address where your name should be, and so forth. Sxipper is extensible; it lets users "map" new forms – by filling in their data, which implicitly identifies the fields – and then it stores the mapping on the Sxipper server. When user B comes to the same site, Sxipper fetches the mapping from the Sxipper server. So rather than do a lot of semantic tagging itself, Sxipper relies on user-generated metadata to parse each new form once only, and then shares the results among its users. Pretty cool.

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Biography

Esther Dyson is an editor at large at CNET Networks and author of ZDNet's Release 0.9 blog. Previously, she was responsible for CNET's newsletter Release 1.0 and PC Forum, the high-tech market's leading annual executive conference.

At CNET and in her private investment activities, Dyson focuses on emerging technologies, emerging companies and emerging markets. Topics she covers include: social software and social networks, registries of people and things, the Internet and public policy, IT and health care, the transformation of e-mail to "Meta-mail", identity management, the use by small businesses of "consumer" Internet services such as Yahoo, eBay and Google, and all things Web 2.0.

By 1994, Dyson had already explored the impact of the Internet on intellectual property (among other things, why many software products are now turning into online services). In 1997, she wrote a book on the impact of the Net on individuals' lives, "Release 2.0: A design for living in the digital age."

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Roboform . . .
SteveTheWirePuller 8th Jan 2007
Seeems to work fine for me. Encrypted, can be put on a U3 or non U3 USB flash drive. Free version and premium version.

I haven't seen it mess up, but haven't been using it that long. What is different about the Server concept? Maybe someone can educate me on well it works for them.

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