BillMonk is now an Obopay company! Settle up online.

We are delighted to announce that BillMonk has been acquired by Obopay, Inc.

Obopay built the first comprehensive mobile person-to-person payments service in the US that lets you instantly send money to anyone using your mobile phone (SMS, WAP, or a downloadable app), or a web browser.

When we first talked to the Obopay team it was clear to us that they care deeply about making it easier to deal with money. Given that BillMonk’s goal is to make money painless between friends, the match couldn’t have been better.

As a first step of integration, BillMonk now lets you settle up your debts online via Obopay! Simply login and click on the new ‘Settle up with Obopay‘ action. Today’s beta release makes it easy to send money to a phone number; we will soon follow up with the ability to send money to an email address.

What’s most exciting about BillMonk joining forces with Obopay is that we can now deliver on a huge number of exciting features, sooner. (And we now have a Seattle office that isn’t our apartments, with a team that isn’t just the two of us!) BillMonk’s growth will be faster than ever, we can work harder than ever, and you benefit more than ever.

A big thanks to all of you for believing in the service and for helping us make it better. It has been a wild and wonderful first year; this next year is going to be through the roof!

Happy Birthday BillMonk!

Yes, it’s been one year already! And what a great year it has been. When we launched the site, our goal was to remove money as a common cause for frustration between friends. It seems like it has been working. In the past year we have seen a tremendous response from thousands of people all over the world, as well as glowing reviews from the press. People used BillMonk to track bills we foresaw like rent, dinner, and groceries; and some which we didn’t like business expenses, and car loans.

The most delightful thing about running BillMonk has been all the love we’ve received from our users, from amazingly detailed feedback to help make the site better, to language translations (BillMonk speaks 7 languages today, with many more on the way), to helping spread the word. Thank you all!

This year promises to be even better than the last. We have lots of exciting features in the pipeline and can’t wait to roll them out. The good news is that we will have the help to do it even faster. BillMonk has been hiring, and we are delighted to annouce the addition of Eric Butler, ace hacker, to the team. He is the first of several team members we hope to add, and is already working to bring you some goodies.

On a final note, we just moved into our new office on beautiful Lake Union! We’ll post some pictures shortly so you can check out the new digs.

BillMonk is hiring

We’re looking for a few software engineers and visual designers to join the team and take BillMonk to the next level. There are a ton of exciting and fun projects on the to-do list; most are for new user-facing features or 3rd party extensions, but there are also some geeky-cool middle-tier applications that will help the site scale and munge data. We offer:

• A small-team work environment where you can be creative and effective
• Competitive salary and benefits
• Interesting projects that have a direct positive impact on peoples’ lives

We strive to capture the good things about being a start-up (small size, high energy), while keeping the bad things in check (long hours, no social life). We’re all about having balanced lives and a friendly workplace where there’s open communication and high output.

All positions are in lovely Seattle, WA; ski in the winter, hike and kayack in the summer – and don’t think about the rain.

Interested? Read more on the BillMonk Jobs page.

Monk doodles

While I was cleaning up yesterday, I ran across the original drawings Darwin Yamamoto had made back in the early-development days when we were brainstorming site logos. I had brought over a bottle of wine, and Darwin, Thomas, and I spent a fun evening doodling and chatting about various ways to visually express BillMonk. As a graphic designer with a passion for video games and character design, Darwin was able to throw out a dizzying number of great ideas. A monk asking for money? A chubby monk, a monk head? What about hands of giving-and-taking? Could we imbue the words “BillMonk” with monk-ness? How about showing the end of the need to post IOU notes on the fridge door? Wouldn’t it be neat if a monk popped genie-like from your cell phone? I thought these drawings were pretty cool, so I scanned in a couple of the pages. Many thanks again to Darwin and Thomas!

Best privacy policy ever!

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) lauded our privacy policy, calling it the “shortest, clearest, and most substantively protective policy we’ve read in a long while.” Wow! When we were getting off the ground, we wrote and re-wrote many drafts of our privacy policy because we wanted to be as clear as possible to our users. (Also, our alpha testers were fantastic nit-pickers). We never thought we’d get props for it, so it’s cool to have the EFF, the authority on such things, point it out as the: Best Privacy Policy Ever?

Help translate BillMonk

Many of our users have asked for BillMonk to be available in their language; what’s cool is that so many of these same users then offered to help translate. Wow! Ok, let’s do it!

Check out http://translate.billmonk.com. It lets anyone enter, fix up, and discuss translations.

Other web 2.0 sites have taken a similar user-collaborative approach to translations, and report their delight at the how fast the community produces high-quality translations. Our home-grown translation tool, Parselmouth, embodies the Wiki philosophy of letting anyone provide information, but we hope you find it even easier to use than a wiki. (And, yes, the Harry Potter naming scheme does prove we’re big ‘ol nerds).

We add languages according to user interest. If you want to see your language, just contact us or leave a comment below.

So please, help us translate BillMonk; just sign up and start clicking!

[UPDATE: Oct 3] In less than 24 hours, Carina finished the German translation. WOW!  Four other languages (Spanish, French, Dutch, and Japanese) are in progress.

[UPDATE: Oct 3] We’ve added a wiki-area for style suggestions, resources, and translator discussions.

Geeking with the Monk

We’re delighted to announce billmonk.com/geek, a place where we will post projects that we’ve open sourced, discussions on technical topics, and APIs to interact with BillMonk. Our first release is a Ruby library for accessing Facebook’s APIs, and we have several more projects on the way. BillMonk is built entirely on open source software, and we’re happy to finally be giving something back to the community.

Boing!

BillMonk is on BoingBoing today! For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, BoingBoing describes itself as “a directory of wonderful things”, and is one of the most frequented sites on the internet. Many thanks to H1kar1, an avid user, for the post.

10 Things Everybody Ought to Know about Bottom-Up Marketing

Since we launched BillMonk in January, we’ve enjoyed a steady flow of positive PR which includes a story in Business 2.0, an interview on BBC World Service Radio, an invitation to speak at Google, several positive blogger reviews including ones from TechCrunch, CNET, eHub, Springwise, and lots of other press.

How did two guys on a shoe-string budget without the help of a PR firm get all this coverage? Many of you have asked, and we wanted to share. Click here to learn about 10 simple but effective strategies we followed to market BillMonk.

BillMonk on BBC World Service Radio

A couple of weeks ago we spoke about BillMonk with the producers of Culture Shock, a BBC World Service Radio show about “the latest global trends in arts, entertainment and culture”. Today’s radio program featured BillMonk as one of the key segments, with more than eight minutes of air time.

The hosts of the show introduced us as “the next MySpace online,” and continued to describe the general problem of borrowing, the BillMonk solution, and the social implications of using a service like ours:

“Most of us have probably forgotten to return stuff on occasion, and this of course, can lead to all kinds of tension… with a student or community setting, [BillMonk is] actually going to make life easier, you are going to do away with the post-it notes, the IOUs, there isn’t going to be one person made to feel like they’re the bill nazi… The community library is a brilliant idea… guerilla [and] ad-hoc… it adds an element of fairness… I think we’re looking at human activities being turned into transactions, because it’s a way of creating social ease.”

Wow! We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.