Boomtrends

BillMonk: Get Your Stuff Back

As I mentioned in the last update (which was way too long ago), things are a bit hectic. I’m looking forward to adding a new section on the site to share just what I mean in the near future. In the meantime, please excuse the plain Wordpress template while we migrate Boomtrends to the new site. Also, as I mentioned we are looking for guest contributors to Boomtrends. Today’s post is from Apurva…enjoy!

If you’re like me, you have trouble remembering things like: Do I owe anyone money? Do they owe me anything? I remember lending Freakonomics to someone, but who? I have Entourage Season 1, but who did I borrow it from? For questions like this, BillMonk provides a great little utility.

Their goal is to “…defuse the financial tensions between friends by providing a tool that manages social money in a way that is easy and fair. Use BillMonk when you need to track money and there isn’t a better way.”

Or, as Hamlet put it, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be, for loan oft loses both itself and friend.” Um. let’s just move on.

To start, you can add your friends via your Facebook account, an excel spreadsheet, or manually with email addresses. Your friends don’t even have to go through the setup process to get an account. If they choose not to, they’ll receive an email message or text message whenever you mention them in your account.

The site itself provides two unique tools. First, it allows you to track who owes you money, and whom you owe money to. If your friends have accounts, whenever one of you makes an entry mentioning the other in a transaction, the information will be shown in your view. To settle these transactions, you can either pay them in person (duh), or you can sign up for an Obopay account (who coincidentally just bought out BillMonk). Once you have your bank account linked to Obopay, you just click on the amount you owe someone and the money will be transferred. Conversely, if someone owes you money, the amount will show up in your account. Of course there’s a service charge for all this: 10 cents to send money and 1.5% to load cash into your account.

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 Rob and we decide to split the $100 bill, and later I owe him $8 for coffee, BillMonk knows that he only owes me a total of $42. When I tell BillMonk that he’s paid me $20, it automatically lowers the amount owed to me to $22.

Although not really a part of the site, Obopay also offers a mobile service that lets you transfer money to your friends through your cell phone via SMS messaging. While I haven’t used this feature yet, I think it has some far-reaching potential. How often do you go to dinner and there’s someone who didn’t bring enough money, so they offer up their credit card, while most of the other people are looking for change because they only have 20 dollar bills?

Using Obopay’s mobile service (or even PayPal’s mobile service), you could easily settle bills right at the table just with a simple text message. For the user who chooses to manage all of his money and transactions through BillMonk, it’s an easy process to download transaction history from Quicken or any other utility that enables CSV functionality. It even provides the capability to ‘tag’ your expenses for easier historical navigation.

While the payment feature is the most popular feature of this site, BillMonk also allows users to set up libraries of all the ’stuff’ they have, focusing primarily on books and DVDs. Using this feature, you can browse your friends’ libraries and ‘check-out’ and ‘check-in’ stuff. The process of going through your actual libraries and inputting them manually is a bit tedious, but it is cool to see what all your other friends have. Instead of rushing out to buy something, you could just as easily find a friend of yours that has it and is willing to lend it out to you.

Now, admittedly, this may seem like a lot of work to keep track of your money and things, and it probably is overkill for easygoing people who are good about paying people back and remembering who has their stuff, but if you have a forgetful set of friends, BillMonk might just be what you’re looking for. As for me, though, I still have no idea who I borrowed Entourage from.

Samsung Blackjack - Hardware, Go. Microsoft, No!

As an unstaffed consultant, there are certain freedoms such as late morning Friday jogs around the Marina. After oogling at pictures and tech specs of the Samsung Blackjack for the past week, I was ready to get my hands on it! I planned my jog to pass the Cingular store. I really didn’t expect to get my hands on the thing but they had just put the Blackjack on display. Lucky me.

I’ve been in the market for a new phone since I am about to get parole from T-Paperweight and have been seriously considering getting a “smartphone“. With the arrival on the Motorola Q, there has been a rush by to get $200 smartphones to market (T-Mobile Dash, Palm Treo 680, etc). One thing that is holding me back is that I have not found a phone that meets MY REQUIREMENTS (besides being a good phone):

• qwerty keyboard
• fast internet
• multimedia capabilities (mp3, video, decent camera, storage)
• small
• easy software navigation

Qwerty keyboard: Check. Considering how a very challenging it is to find my jeans size at the GAP, I will assume I am of average male GAP shopper size and my hards are proportional. The keyboard was as easy as I can image a 2.3 inch wide keyboard can be to type on.

Fast Internet: Check. This sucka is equipped with the fastest 3G internet you can get on a mobile. The browser supports full html pages so you can waste your life on myspace, while at work.

Multimedia: Half Check. Speakers are fine for a phone but this thing has a proprietary headphone jack. My current Samsung phone also has this and it is EXTREMELY annoying because you are stuck using Samsung headphones (there are no adaptors to a normal 3.5mm headphone jack). These headphones don’t stay in my ears too well, so they are relegated to the original box in my closet.Cingular video worked well, the video recording and photo capabilities are par for the course (1.3mp camera and 320×240 video recording). Lastly there is a microSD slot to tote 2gb of junk with you.

Small: Check. This is one of the most compact smart phones with a full keyboard. The Blackjack feels good to hold and well made. It is not much larger than a closed RAZR and it is light too!

Easy Software: NO! This is a nightmare. I really think Microsoft should have done a better job of hiding the Windows Mobile files from the user. Just be navigating to get to the My Documents folder I found my way into a Windows directory full of mysterious configuration files. I have enough of that crap on my PC and I don’t want to take it with me everywhere. Compared to the ease of the Nokia S60 Symbian software, this is hell in your palm. I had to click too many times to get anything done. Windows does allow you to run many applications at once, but it is not clear how to exit applications so you end up with so many running that the phone becomes SLOW.

Finally, there is some software on the phone that prompts the user if they want to allow internet connection with every data request. When using Google Maps Mobile or Gmail Mobile, I was seriously interrupted every 2 seconds to with a prompt to allow the data connection. I experience this the LG CU500 so it may be a Cingular issue, but regardless it sucks. I dug through all sorts of internet settings looking for a way to always allow internet connections to no avail.

If there is a way to un-castrate the data software, I’d consider it but as a data phone that does not like data, I cannot.This phone’s software lacks the “smart” in the “smartphone” name. Where is a 3G Nokia smartphone?