Buxfer
by Robin Wauters on February 6, 2009

New York-based Loudwater Labs has sold the assets of its online personal finance management application Thrive to Tree.com (Nasdaq:TREE), the company behind services such as the formerly IAC-owned LendingTree and RealEstate.com. This means that the publicly listed Tree.com now has a very good resource in its hands as well as sufficient reach to give Mint and other personal finance management tools like Wesabe, Geezeo and Buxfer a run for their money.

Tree.com Chairman and CEO Doug Lebda commented that the acquisition of Thrive is a perfect fit with the strategic vision of Tree.com, and you don’t have to be a genius to see that he has a point there. Tree.com operates a number of strong brands in the financial and real estate space, and its customer base can clearly benefit from free tools like Thrive which enable users to better monitor, manage and improve their personal financial health, particularly in the tough economic times we’re in.

Finnish Startup Scred Adds Another Way To Divvy Up Debts Between Friends
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by Erick Schonfeld on April 3, 2008

scred-logo.pngToday, 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.

Buxfer Adds Payments; Now Perfect For Settling Your Bar Tab
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by Nick Gonzalez on August 3, 2007

buxferlogo.pngSocial payment service Buxfer has added peer to peer payments to its money management system. The payment system is supported through Amazon’s new Flexible Payments web service we reported on earlier. Buxfer is one of the first companies on the service’s private beta along with Jungle Disk, Freshbooks, and Beetlabs. Buxfer will be footing the bill for the 1-2% transaction fees till the end of August. They will also be rewarding users that add their friends to the service.

Buxfer, similar to Billmonk (sold to Obopay last year), lets you track and tag your expenses with friends and groups. Social payment sites like these aren’t meant to replace beefier accounting applications like Quicken or Wesabe, but rather easily track account balances with a heavy social networking component. You can either add you payments to Buxfer manually or import a payment statement from your bank, Quicken, or Microsoft Money. Having your payments on Buxfer lets you manage your balances with friends and analyze your expenses over time through pie charts and graphs. Since we last covered them, Buxfer has added a Facebook, mobile, and iPhone application.

The new payment system adds the option to “send a payment”. Sending a payment requires the email of Buxfer account you want to send the payment to and the amount. Submitting the transaction will take you to Amazon Payment’s site, which will handle the rest of the process. If the recipient has an Amazon account, the money will simply be deposited. Unfortunately, If they don’t have an account, Amazon will just pester you to get your friend on the service before the transaction can be completed.

Demo Day: Y Combinator’s Spring Chicks
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by Nick Gonzalez on March 9, 2007

y combinatorAfter CondĂ© Nast, owner of Wired and other magazines/websites, acquired Y Combinator funded Reddit, people took notice. This wasn’t just some quirky incubator where they gave college students a few bucks to kick start their new companies (although it is that, too – their standard deal is $5000 + $5000 per founder, for 6%ish of the company) – real products were coming out of Y Combinator, and people started to notice.

Y Combinator funds startups twice per year, in batches. Funded startups that have previously launched include Reddit, Kiko, Loopt, ClickFacts, TextPayMe, Snipshot, Inkling, Flagr, Wufoo, YouOS, PollGround, LikeBetter, Thinkature, JamGlue, Shoutfit, Scribd, Weebly, Buxfer, and Octopart. Today, Y Combinator invited in TechCrunch and a select group of investors and industry experts to view the current crop of companies, just getting ready to launch. Michael Arrington and I attended the sessions, and our notes on the new companies are below.

Here’s a rundown of who presented, minus a few who are still in stealth mode:

Zenter
zenterlogo.pngZenter is an web based presentation app that promises to really take advantage of being online. Users will have the regular functionality of PowerPoint, but with the ability to directly add content from the web (Google Images). Each public slide show will also be put into a public library, for other users to remix or just drop into their show.

Weebly
weeblylogo.pngWeebly is an AJAX website creator that recently joined Y Combinator. Weebly’s drag-n-drop interface lets you quickly put together a personal website any way you like. For the demonstration they recreated the Benchmark Capital website. They recently had a great upgrade to their site which included some slick new themes and layouts possibilities. Our previous coverage of Weebly is here and here.

Virtualmin
virtualminlogo.pngVirtualmin is taking on the lack of innovation in the server admin programs, like Plesk, by making a more accessable version for pages managed by the non-technical crowd. The program will feature simple installs of popular programs like content management systems that often cost extra on other providers. It will also let you administer your website from your desktop and mobile device.

Octopart
octopartlogo1.pngVertical search engine Octopart, which launched not too long ago, focuses on putting an end the inadequate search engines used by electronics parts manufacturers. Octopart lets you search, compare prices, and view specifications for parts on Allied Electronics, Digi-Key, Mouser, and Newark InOne. They have a deal with how-to hobbyist’s site, Instructables, to make buying parts for your project a snap. They’ve also got more parts supplies calling to get their data up on the site.

Tsumobi
Mobile applications have so far been nightmares to implement. It’s often hard to gain adoption due to complicated installs and near impossible to get users to upgrade their version once the product has shipped. Tsumobi hopes to solve this problem by creating their own language. The new language will sit on top of J2ME and process applications downloaded (via URL) for Tsumobi enabled sites. This means that developers will be able to change Tsumobi applications on the fly and have Tsumobi enabled phones automatically get the updates just by visiting a link.

Whitenoise Networks
whitenoiselogo.pngWhitenoise is like a social network for the music industry. It comes with specially made tools for bands, agents, publicists, and venues to manage each part of their business. Bands will be able to manage their cross country tours by map, using a venue search to find gigs in any town they’re passing through. Venues will get access to a full list of artists in their area along with samples and ways to reach their agent to book a show.

Buxfer
buxferlogo1.pngBuxfer is Quicken for 20 somethings. As we covered before, it solves a problem similar to Billmonk, but with more advanced features. Buxfer tackles the unique needs of young people trying to find out where all their money evaporates to and reign in their expenses. To date, they’ve been tracking $8.4 million in over 30,000 transactions.

Writewith.com
writewithlogo.pngWritewith is a collaborative writing web app, enabling you to easily flow through the steps of writing, editing, and publishing a document with a group. A document is started by uploading an existing document (.doc, .txt, .rdf) or just typing away. After the initial draft is completed, you can invite other editors by email and assign them tasks. Writewith has full version control and even lets you post comments to each other, making it possible to edit together in real time. Currently Writewith is in beta testing with 15 college newspapers including Stanford and two of Canada’s largest college papers (which even includes a national newswire).

Socialmoth
socialmothlogo.pngSocialmoth is a community to post your thoughts anonymously. You can view postings (mostly gossip and secrets) from the whole community as well as get updates for when someone in your group of friends makes a post. The vast majority of their members appear to be women, with over 600 posts being made per day. These guys will also be taking a new spin on their idea, launching Disenchat.com, a place to post anonymously about your workplace. The system will verify your organization by email address (like Facebook) and let you start riffing. Outsiders will be able to see the existence of the forum and volume of posting, but not the specific comments.

View3
view3logo.pngView3 plans on changing the way 3D models are made. Like Photosynth, View3 will let you walk into and explore 3D images of photos, but will let you use as little as one photo to get started. The project has been started by a group of 3 Stanford grad students and currently holds 2 patents in the area.

Auctomatic

auctomaticlogo.pngeBay power users make an average of 400 listings per day. With 5 pages to fill to make a listing, that’s 2000 page views and a lot of clicking. Auctomatic plans to make this a whole lot simpler first by cutting it down to a single page and then adding more management features on top. eBay sales management is a category currently dominated by Vendio and Marketworks, who together contribute about $1.8 billion dollars of goods to the auction giant. For their service, these providers often take a percentage of sales, as well as a monthly fee that can be as high as $400. Auctomatic plans to have more a more flexible program and pricing. They have already raised $400K in angel financing apart from Y Combinator.

Snipshot
snipshotlogo1.pngSnipshot is a photo editor that lets you start editing any photo with one click of a bookmarklet. You can use Snipshot to crop, resize, adjust colors, an automatically enhance you photos within your browser and then save it back to the web. There are a couple other photo editors in this category and Photoshop plans to get in as well.

Billmonk Has A Half Brother
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by Nick Gonzalez on March 2, 2007

buxferlogo.pngSocial/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.

buxferscreen.pngBuxfer 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.

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