Today, at the Next Web conference, I met the founders of Scred, a Finnish startup that lets friends manage their their debts to each other. Scred is an application that makes it easy to split up tabs at restaurants or bars. You can download a mobile version to your phone, for easy bill-splitting calculations after a few rounds. Competitors include BillMonk, Buxfer, and Obopay. But Scred has a few European twists. Managing currency conversions is no problem. If I am chipping in for a meal in Amsterdam, it can tell me how much I owe in dollars and how much my Dutch friends owe in Euros. It also lets you pool debts between friends. So if I owe you $5, and you owe our mutual friend Nancy $7, it automatically allocates my $5 to Nancy. CrunchBase Information Scred BillMonk Buxfer obopay Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Geezeo Mobile is the first in a suite of mobile financial applications aimed at the 18 – 35 and student demographic. The new application Geezeo Mobile lets you check you banking balance on the go. To get started, you can sign into Geezeo by setting up an account with them, or using your existing Gmail user name and password. Once logged in, you can add your various bank accounts to your profile. Unfortunately this requires you to hand over your banking credentials to this new startup out of Framingham, Massachusetts (Banks haven’t caught on to read/write privileges yet). The system seems to cover accounts for every financial institution I’ve heard of, from Bank of America to even the smaller credit unions. They have a good screencast here. → Read More
Social/mobile payments site Billmonk had a mini merger with competitor Obopay last month (we called it a “battle for relevance” since PayPal has a strong product offering in the mobile space as well). Buxfer is another social money Y Combinator funded company that softly launched last September. It provides the same basic functionality of Billmonk, such as keeping a running total of debts and credits with your friends (only money), but has grown up a little and added some nice data visualization. Buxfer is deeper than Billmonk, letting you track and tag out your expenses with friends and groups over time. The groups option makes it great for managing debts between roommates or within a club. Billmonk is more geared to managing splitting debts between friends and lending out your stuff. Buxfer goes further, letting you analyze you expenses over time through a Google finance-style pie chart with adjustable time frame. Buxfer has gone to great lengths to make importing transactions as easy as possible. They currently support adding transactions to your account via SMS and the ability to import your credit card statements (.csv,.qfx,.ofx). From there you can tag and divide up your expenses as you see fit. What’s great is that these sites start with a simple day-to-day problem that can frustrates us all and present a solution. However, without intimate integration with payment services, it’s still a chore. I’m not so OCD that I will tag and text myself about every payment I make. Wesabe has payment integration, but is also going after the quicken market. Billmonk really benefited from integration with Obopay deal and perhaps Buxfer will find a similar partner. → Read More
In a battle for relevance in the mobile payments space, mobile to mobile payment service Obopay has acquired social payment service Billmonk. Neither are disclosing the size of the acquisition, which is undoubtedly a tiny and probably stock for stock deal. The integration of the two services will first let users settle the debts they tracked on Billmonk instantly over Obopay’s mobile payment platform and eventually by email. You can see Obopay’s release here and Billmonk’s here. Founders Gaurav Oberoi and Chuck Groom will be moving to Obopay’s new Seattle office to focus on solving the “social accounting problem”. This is a crowded space with a single, hugely dominate player, PayPal Mobile. See TextPayMe and KushCash as well. → Read More
I attended the E27 Technology Conference today at Stanford University. Startups founded by entrepreneurs who are less than 27 years old were eligible to present. With a couple of exceptions these companies were all new to me, and a few have the potential to be real winners. The E27 founders did a great job of picking quality attendees (lots of venture capitalists, big company representatives and bloggers in the audience), and promising companies. The invite-only event was created by Noah Kagan, Shivani Sopory, and Nancy Gong. Below are my notes on each of the nine startups that presented. See Robert Scoble and Emily Chang for additional commentary, and Max Kiesler has a podcast recording of the entire event here. BillMonk I wrote about BillMonk last week. The company, founded by Gaurav Oberoi and Chuck Groom, have created an excellent tool for managing social debts and IOUs. It’s easy to see this catching on. IOweYou is a competitor. 411 Metro 411Metro, is an advertiser-supported free 411 service. Derek Merrill presented the company. His co-founders are Alec Andronikov and Alexey Bulavin. 411Metro joins Free411 and 411 Save in this space, with a nearly identical business model of playing a short advertisment from a competitor to the requested business. The company is seed funded from Hummer Winblad and launched in November 2005 Standpoint Standpoint, which launched today, is a “wikipedia of opinions”. At its core it is a simple blog for users to post their opinions and links to websites that help them form or support those opinions. Topics are grouped and the aggregate opinion of the community on any topic can be gauged. Co-founder Justin Smith presented. Gentry Underwood is Standpoint’s other founder. LicketyShip Robert Pazornik’s LicketyShip has the potential to be a big winner. It is an ecommerce service that can deliver purchased goods within two hours of placing the order. The magic? They combing local retail shops with the apparent over-capacity in the local courier market. Couriers pick items up at retail shops and deliver them immediately. Lickety Ship hopes to tap into the must-have-now crowd (Robert claims theat 30% of Amazon orders pay for overnight shipping, often paying more for shipping than for the item itself). The company is beta testing now in a few select cities. This reminds me of the good old days when we had kozmo to deliver a packet of skittles. The difference here is → Read More
BillMonk is a new service that allows people to easily keep track of financial debts among friends. It’s a simple idea and they’ve executed well. The idea is a user who wants to report a debt owed to him or her (such as a shared bill), or an IOU to another person, simply enters it on BillMonk. This is very easy to do on BillMonk, even for more complicated transactions like a bill shared among a lot of people. You simply input the amount of the bill and the email addresses for those who participated. There is also an SMS feature to allow users to text in bills on the phone. I like the way BillMonk keeps track of all of the various transactions a user has with different people, and the current amount owed at any given time. For instance, if I buy dinner for my friend Orli Yakuel and we decide to split the $100 bill, and later I owe her $8 for coffee, BillMonk knows that she only owes me a total of $42. When I tell BillMonk that she’s paid me $20, it automatically lowers the amount owed to me to $22. Of course, if the people I am emailing are not yet using the service, they can sign up. So they’ve got the viral angle covered. It’s useful, and really easy to use without FAQ references. There is also a way to SMS bills in via a mobile device. As of now, however, they have not integrated paypal or any other payment API. Scott Loftesness and John Cook have also recently written about BillMonk. The company was founded by Gaurav Oberoi and Chuck Groom, who previously worked at Amazon. → Read More
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