Harmonypark | API

Using the Expensure Circular Debt Resolution algorithm to resolve the European debt merry-go-round

After watching this clip on the lending merry-go-round of EU debt, we are considering offering the Expensure Circular Debt Resolution algorithm to the European Central Bank to help them to untangle the mismanaged of debt obligations between member states.

It seems pretty hard to find out any true numbers on exactly who owes whom what, but if each EU Leader would like to drop a discrete email to us over at Expensure we can at least come up with a starting point solution to begin negotiations with. 

We'll even donate our consulting fees to charity. 

Clarke and Dawe: Lending merry-go-round (via BoingBoing / O'Reilly Radar)

Expensure presented at the MiniBar: Finance Innovation [VIDEO]

Here is a video from the recent MiniBar: Finance Innovation event that Ebony presented Expensure at. Having lost his notes, Ebony grabbed a few G&Ts and free-styled, so a few of the slides don't really makes sense :] 

The Scratch An Itch slide was in there because we think when you make an app you should really try and create something that scratches your own itch in terms of a problem solving starting point. 

The key Thing We Learned early on whilst creating the service was that you should release as fast as you can (Find Truth Fast), as you can easily spend too long testing out features privately when really user awareness and feedback can almost never come to early. 

We did our first demo in the end of 2007, but we actually could have done so way before that. It was also many months later before we let external people sign up to a beta programme and use the app.

You may also want to read our list of things not to do when launching your startup.

Use Expensure to manage your Xmas Gift Lists

It's always a mission to keep track of all the stuff you need to pick up at this time of year. Save yourself some pain and let Expensure remember it all your Xmas shopping needs for you. 

Store all your gift ideas and Xmas dinner/holiday shopping requirements safe and securely in one single place. 

If you are sharing the shopping with multiple people you can let then view the list online too and everyone can tick things off as they pick things up (and let Expensure sort out who owes whom what!).

 

You can also use Expensure on your mobile to keep the list with you when you're out and about and tick things off as you go.

Happy Xmas and Happy Shopping!

Expensure gets a writeup in Yahoo News

We're currently over in San Francisco and Yahoo News gave Expensure a writeup as part of a piece they have done on PayPal opening up their API to the developer ecosystem. 

The Innovate 09 conference has been a really cool experience with a lot of interesting people getting together and talking about the next wave of business models and how they might/will be powered.

The conference has definitely given us a lot of ideas of how we can make Expensure even more relevant and useful to our users. 

Expensure releases new multi-person PayPal payment feature

We've just released a new multi-person payment feature that lets Expensure users payback many people at once using a single PayPal transaction. 

Expensure is one of the first ever online services to offer feature this innovative new PayPal payment system, and we're launching this at the PayPal Innovate 09 conference in San Francisco. 

We'll be updating the FAQ shortly for people who want to know more, but all you need to use this feature is a current Expensure login.

We've also added a bunch of highly requested features that we'll be rolling out shortly across the service.

Expensure reviewed by The Next Web

Expensure has just been reviewed by The Next Web, a cool (and highly influential) tech/startup news source. Getting press for bootstrapped startups is always hard, so when it happens it feels great!

If you'd like to write something about the service, its founders or what it is like to bootstrap a startup in London, get in touch. We'll also be over in San Francisco in a few days to help spread the Expensure word. Stay tuned for updates on that too. 

Note to Editors: Expensure is a free to use web-based Shared Expense Management service that people can use to track, manage and resolve the expenses they share with groups of people. 

Mike Evans, Ebony Charlton and Andrew McPhee created the service to solve a problem they had keeping tabs on shared bills and expenses that had when they flatted together. You can find out more about Expensure here.

Expensure invited by PayPal to demo at Innovate 09 Conference in San Francisco

We have been invited by PayPal to demo Expensure.com at the PayPal Innovate 09 Conference in San Francisco. The conference is the first of its kind for PayPal and will take place on Nov 3rd and 4th 2009. 

Billed as the Intersection of Ideas & Money, the conference will have an abundance of labs and workshops on offer, and we're proud to have been chosen to demo Expensure, which as you by now might have guessed will soon be offering the the ability for users to resolve payments via PayPal in an innovative and interesting manner. 

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As we'll be over in San Francisco during the week of the conference and are up for meeting with other startups, entrepreneurs and investors in the San Francisco area during that week (get in touch).

Calling all developers: how could you use an Expensure API?

We've been busy beavering away, working with a stealth-mode start-up in the travel sector who need to keep track of who owes whom what. A natural fit, we thought, for an Expensure API. This got us thinking: perhaps there are others out there who need a bit of debt resolution in their apps too? If so, we'd love to hear from you! Get in touch with us and let us know how you might use an Expensure API, and we'll let you know when the beta version is ready to go.

How to Track your expenses: Expensure launches a new 'Trends' section: Helping you answer the question of "where does your money go each month?"

There is an age old saying of "if you can't measure it, then you can't control it". This is certainly true when you look at household spending. You may think that you're spending more or less, but it can be hard to quanitify these things when you running a household day-to-day.

Our latest addition to Expensure couldn't have come at a better time. As everyone's attention has recently turned from making crazy money to saving money like crazy we have created a new 'Trends' section that shows you exactly where your money is going each month.

 

You can now assign each purchase to a category (there are a bunch of defaults or you can make your own). As you add new bills and expenses each week/month Expensure plots a couple of helpful graphs that will show you exactly which areas of your household spending are starting to cost you more and more.

And yes, we are aware that it took not one, but two Fridays to get this live, but we think you'll find it was worth the wait...

Expensure to release five new features during next 5 weeks!

As monthly outgoings for UK households "soar by 26%", and with a recent YouGov poll finding that 44% of people in the UK are reigning in their spending, people are crying out for smarter ways to manage their bills, their expenses and their lifestyles.

So after a busy month spent collating your feedback and brainstorming new features to make Expensure even more useful to people who want to simplify the way they manage and resolve shared money and expenses, we've now come up with Five key new features that we will be releasing to you over the next 5 weeks to help you stay in control.

Now as Albert Einstein so eloquently stated: “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts”, we've split these new features across several areas that will address multiple elements of the social money lifecycle.

Check back every Friday throughout this period to try out these new features and see for yourself how they can help give you even more conrtol over the social aspects of your finances.