Personal 06/07/12

Imagine having a searchable, shareable data vault of your project that’s accessible anywhere.  This time it’s Personal.

I’ve been a big fan of  SplashID which helps organize your life by keeping track of passwords, PIN numbers, credit cards and other sensitive information on your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad.

In our hack, Use password algorithms for added security, we show you how to use the SplashID iOS app to store your sensitive data, encrypt it and save it to the Cloud.

As much as I like SplashID though, it has its limitations.  The search feature is not robust enough, the UI is clunky and there aren’t enough data categories or ways to granularly share data with collaborators.

The people behind Personal have completely re-imagined our relationship with our data.

Their platform makes it easy to organize and share while giving you top notch security controls. The thing that makes Personal so different than other data vaults though, are what it calls Gems.

According to the site, Gems are:

Small sets of data about any aspect of your life. You decide which gems to add to your vault and which to share with others. Once you add them to your vault you can fill them in as you wish. Do it once and use over and over!

The practical application of this from a work perspective is being able to selectively share information from your project repository.

Instead of having a client overwhelmed by all the minutia of the project wiki, you can create a flexible, discrete and targeted information pipeline.  You’ll send them only the bits of info they need.

For instance, on any given video project you’ll have categories like:

• Contacts
• Video Specs.
• Codes
• Media
• Scripts
• Meeting Notes
• Research
• etc…

Your clients, for example, don’t need to see all of this info.  All they may need is the:

• Vimeo password for the encrypted approval file
• FTP account details
• Directions to tomorrow’s video shoot
• Production manager’s cellphone number
• Revised Project timeline
• etc…

Or imagine as a freelance video editor whose just started contracting at a big corporation how the gems in the picture below could be helpful:

I know what you’re thinking,  services like Basecamp, Shotgun, etc… already have permission based access controls.  But in many cases what they lack is being able to send all of the data as discrete information.  Also, a lot of places still don’t use these project management services.

Personal is currently FREE and so are the iOS and Android apps.

 

Check out their extensive site and videos to see Personal in action.

 

(the featured photo ‘diary 2’ is from Elisa of Stock Exchange)