As of yesterday, apps all have ratings based on various content like cartoon violence. Try resubmitted now that parental controls are on the way and don't check "None" for cartoon violence. See what happens.
Sans-hardware (not supported until 3.0), there are a lot of apps for the iPhone that do credit card processing, including the one that's on Apple TV ad right now: http://innerfence.com
Banking is strong - this is just one of the ways to upload.
Obviously, if we could do what we want with ubiquitous Flash, we would. But since we can't ...
Silverlight's first time install is actually quite reasonable - it doesn't even require a browser restart. And we've had more people try it than I would have believed.
The landscape is always changing. At some point Flash 10 will be a reality. Since it's just the two of us, we're paying a lot of attention to the shifting landscape (for example, Yahoo's recent stuff). If and when a better alternative is available, we will definitely switch to it.
In fact, that's precisely what we do. It's easy to see how you might have gotten the wrong impression, since our front page is deliberately light on technical details.
We're trying to bridge the gap between tech-savvy photo sharing -- using web pages and not clogging up people's inboxes -- and the vast majority of people who don't understand URLs and just want to see the pictures.
Our tool creates a web page that's under the user's control, just like you say, and it simply sends out an email that links to the page. But in an HTML-capable mail reader, you also get a nice grid of image links to the photo thumbnails. (Click a thumb goes to the larger version on the web.)
Hopefully, it's the best of both worlds. My mom (she's not a focus group) gets to see the pictures, and she doesn't need to remember a URL to go to or tell other people about. On the other hand, I don't have to wait five minutes for gnus to download her enormous photo attachments.
One thing Derek failed to mention that might be interesting to the HN set: we're using Catalyst, which is a Perl-based MVC framework. It's a little unorthodox, as the popular choices these days seem to be RoR and django.
We've been really happy with Catalyst, especially its Chained dispatch type. And CPAN has been really helpful since there's just the two of us working on this right now. :-)
Catalyst has an active mailing list and IRC channel full of helpful people. For more information, check out http://www.catalystframework.org/.