Facebook, full throttle

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Sometime back we added the functionality to signup and login with Facebook. Not surprisingly, the ability to add and invite Facebook friends was the most requested feature.

You asked for it, we built it for you!

Add bills with facebook friends

If you are not already facebook connected, simply go to your account settings and hit “Connect with facebook”. Once complete, you will now see your facebook friends in search results across all three platforms – iPhone, Android and web.

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Your facebook friends (who are not billpin users) will show with a “facebook” tag. Go ahead, select them, pin them and forget about emails forever.

Now the exciting bit!

With this release, we have also baked in the functionality for you to notify friends via facebook.

Since we have no way to notify your facebook friends via email, we designed an easy and private way for you to notify them via facebook instead*.

Not much changes, except now will see an additional option to notify your facebook friends when adding them to a bill. If you are on the web, you will see the option to notify during the pinning flow. While on mobile, you will see it the first time after completing a pin and toggle it on/off from the account settings page.

Dont worry, you will always have full control of your privacy and notifications.

post

Having spoken to many of our users, we were well aware of your concerns, and thus made the default privacy setting of the post as “Only Me”.

Meaning, only you and the tagged friend will  see the post. None of your, or their friends can view it.

A sample facebook timeline post on the right, viewable to only only me and Lisa Chan.

* Facebook posts are only meant to notify facebook friends who are not billpin users. If the friend you are pinning with is already a BillPin user, or if you enter a friends email, we only send them an email notification and not facebook.

 

Invite facebook friends to BillPin

Invite Friends

This is another feature that was frequently requested and we have baked it right in!  You can invite either your Facebook friends, or just enter the email address of the friend you want to invite.

Look out for the “Invite friends” link on web or mobile, and with a few simple clicks share the BillPin awesomeness with your buddies :)

We are very excited about this release.. and hope you find it even simpler and faster to share bills with your friends!

 

Getting past firewalls with SSH Tunnels

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So, the news is out, we’ve acquired BillMonk. As part of the process we had to go through in integrating our backend systems and assets, we had to transfer data in and out of the existing BillMonk servers. One tricky bit though, their setup was pretty secure, being behind firewalls and a VPN, and could only be accessed via a single port (SSH), from one specific IP address. Only by connecting though that would we then have access to the rest of the infrastructure (VPN).

We quickly realised that in order to extract existing BillMonk data we would have to go through a 2-hop process.

First, we would have to dump it on the gateway server (the server that allows access to the rest of the servers), then scp it out onto the single authorised server, then scp/axel it onto the new database server we were going to set up. Well, being the hackers that we are, that was too much work. So we started devising ways to get around it.

There’s this really neat feature in SSH that allows you to establish permanent tunnels across 2 servers. And to top it off, you can ensure that it’s encrypted as well. This technique is often known as the ‘Poor man’s VPN’. We used it in our migration as described in the example below.

Let’s call the authorised server gateway2, and the target gateway server gateway1. Then let’s call the target server target, and assume it’s listening to port 9999. Finally, our own destination database server is called bp db. In order to expose port 9999 on target to the outside world, you’d have to type the following command on gateway1 in screen (or tmux).

ssh user@gateway2 -L *:8888:target:9999

What this command does is that it opens port 8888 on gateway2 that is connected to port 9999 on target through gateway1. After the tunnel is set up, all you need to do is to connect to gateway1:8888, and you’ll be connecting directly to target:9999.

tunnel

The SSL is provided by the database.

Effectively this manage to reduce the process down into a single hop process, and made exporting a 41GB database a lot easier and faster.

St Patty’s Aftermath

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Recovering from St Patty’s?

Starting to recall that you may have owed your buddy a couple (dozen) of drinks? (or the other way round?)

No worries, just billpin them and split that tab you wrecked up.

St-Patty

Apps fresh off the oven, and a big Thank You!

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Last week saw the launch of our biggest update to BillPin yet! Fresh new apps for all of our platforms, i.e. the web, iPhone and Android!

The team had been working hard, laying the ground work for this release for over 3 months and pulling a one-month sprint with many sleepless nights and awesome pizza-carbs to keep us going! Early response has been highly encouraging :) But this  is just the start in our efforts to make social money as painless as possible, and we will continue to find new ways to make your experience ever so easy and delightful!

We will jump into whats new in a bit, but first we would like THANK ALL OUR USERS  for supporting us and for being a part of our journey! 

It wouldn’t have been quite the same without our early beta users, who were always so happy to share their thoughts, suggestions and feedback with us; always willing to give us their time whenever we wanted to talk to them! We want to thank you for such awesome journey mates:) And if you have just become a part of our small family, we welcome you and wish to tell you that we area always here to listen to you. Feel free to email us (feedback@billpin.com) or find us on twitter/facebook anytime, and we would be glad to get the conversation going. We want to continue building a product that you love!

Shared Bills arrive on iPhone and Android

Shared bills- on iPhone and Android

The latest updated to iPhone and Android bring the most requested featured – shared bills – right to your mobile device!

We tried to make the experience of pinning shared bills on mobile phones as simple as possible.  As soon as you go to the shared bills page on the apps you will see a list of 10 suggested friends that you can instantly select as participants of the bill. And if you want to add more friends, just click on the “Add more friends to the bill” button at the bottom.

From there on, you can go on to pin a shared bill – split equally amongst the participants or by amounts (if everyones shares was different).

Update BillPin for – iPhone on app store and Android on play store. If you <3 the apps, give the team a “pat on the back” by giving us a fabulous ★★★★★ review! :)  

 

Brand new! BillPin web app.

Brand new! Billpin for web.

We launched a pretty simple mobile web app back in September, which was optimised for mobile devices.

Meet the brand new Billpin web app, which has been completely redesigned to utilise the screen space and offer the best user experience for sharing bills on the web.

Learning from our users, and their interactions with BillPin, we noticed that over 80% of all transactions being added from the web were in fact shared bills for group expenses. So with this version, we have tried to focus your whole experience around pinning shared bills. Do tell us what you think :)

 

Personalize your Billpin, connect via Facebook! 

Connect via facebook! With the latest updates, you will now be able to login and signup using your Facebook accounts on all three platforms, i.e. the web, the iOS app and the Android app.

To connect with facebook, Login -> Settings -> Connect with Facebook

Connecting with facebook will allow you search for all your Facebook friends who are also on BillPin*. Note: This is a web only feature for now. Coming soon to iPhone and Android!

 

We hope you like the new apps and experience across all platforms! And we would love to hear your thoughts, feedback and suggestions :) Just email us – feedback@billpin.com

Peace out.

VCs – Learn this marketing shit

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ashton kutcher

What should startups want in an investor?

Money, smarts, rolodex – sure. But that’s not enough anymore.

I want my VC to do marketing for me too.

Pimp my startup

Ron Conway is certainly no lesser investor than Dave McClure.

But there are 100x more startup people and early adopters in Asia who know 500 Startup from his many tours of duty. (that is certainly true in Croatia too).

More importantly, amongst those are hackers and hustlers I want to hire – people who may never have heard of Ron or SVAngels.

VCs like First Round Capital routinely pimp their startups out, such as through their Holiday Video which has more than 100,000 views.

(FRC Partner Josh Kopelman, the genius who spent $100k to get Halfway, Oregon to rename itself to Half.com and later selling the company for 300M, makes a pretty cool Psy)

Credibility gone wild

VCs lend you their credibility, which is incredibly important.

It used to be about whether the investor is a smart investor with proven good bets. It used to mean Doer, Moritz and Valentine.

No longer. Today, in the world of fans, followers and Klout scores, credibility takes on a whole new meaning.

The fact that Ashton Kutcher can get into deals that even top tier investors can’t (like AirBnB or Fab) says something about the value of investor-as-marketer.

As startups become faster and leaner in a flatter more competitive world, a plug by Ashton on Two and a Half Men, or to his 13.5 million twitter followers could easily be worth as much as the network of a Silicon Valley kingmaker (especially for a consumer company like Foursquare).

You might argue – what credibility could a Hollywood actor command? Well, the fact is, in the eyes of the 20-year-old college kid who is my target user, Ashton’s got way more credibility than Eric Schmidt. Besides, it turns out Ashton Kutcher is a really smart investor too!

If I had to pick between Ashton and Doer, I’d have to admit it could be a hard choice today. (I’ll pick Charlie Sheen over them both though, just saying)

Moral of the story – as a startup, my problem nowadays is a lot less about money or contacts, and a lot more about distribution and adoption. So VCs, please build your brand and learn how to pimp your startups out.

 

[This was a guest post by BillPin CEO Darius Cheung on TechInAsia]

BillPin iOS gets a “Heart -Update”

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Earlier this week we released a new update to the BillPin iPhone app, bringing amazing speed improvements and a smoother pinning experience to iOS.

On the outside, much looks the same. But its really the stuff that has changed in the inside, the very heart of the app so to say, which is the real story here. The changes we made were so monumental that this update could possible deserve to be called v2.0, but we have something else in store for v2.0 and its coming soon :)  

Coming back to v1.1, the changes were made to make the whole app more efficient, smooth and fast. After speaking to many of our users, we realised that the single most important things you want to do is to pin a transaction as soon as possible. With this version we focused on ensuring that you are able to do just that, and in super quick time. In short, you will find the app to be slick and speedy the next time you pin a bill :)  

Its has been an awesome week here at BillPin. We released our very first BillPin Android app, pushed a “mega-mini” update to iOS and we even got a teeny mention as a must have app for college students studying abroad on mashable! 

But this is only the beginning. We are very excited about some of the stuff we are working on and we can’t wait to share them with you! 

Keep talking to us, and tell us what you think! 

Hello Android, meet BillPin!

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BillPin launched with a vision to make friendships squabble free, to make it extremely easy for friends to keep track of their shared expenses. And at the heart of our vision lies our motivation to design an experience focused entirely around the user and their most personal device – their mobile phone. 

The iOS app came first, and today we are pleased to announce the arrival of BillPin on Android!

With the BillPin Android app, we worked hard to bring a simple and elegant design that is intuitive and native to all Android users. One glance and you will instantly know what you need to do and see all information that is relevant to you in a well organised fashion. 

We wanted to utilise the best of Android as a platform, and for that reason we built the android app bottom-up, with a completely new beautiful design that brings the best pinning experience to Android. 

As always, we welcome any feedback/suggestions/bug reports from our users. Feel free to ping us on twitter (@billpinapp) or just write to us at feedback@billpin.com. 

Peace.

- The BillPin Pinchos