Billmonk
We want to ease the strains of finances on friendships. Do you feel like you’re always leaking money to your friends? Do the tensions run high between housemates whenever bills are due? Does the unpleasantness of dividing restaurant bills make you want to bury your head under the tablecloth? Do you scribble IOUs which you intend to pay but quickly forget?
That’s where we come in. Our patent-pending technology makes it super-easy for you to tell us about bills using your cell phone or web browser, and then we do all the work of figuring who owes whom how much. This service is absolutely free.
h3. Gaurav Oberoi, Co-founder and Developer
Gaurav designed and programmed the “BillMonk (Billmonk.com)”:http://billmonk.com backend—the guts of the system.
At “Amazon.com (Amazon.com)”:http://amazon.com, Gaurav wrote core components of the browse services that are responsible for categorizing every item at Amazon so that they can be searched, browsed and therefore sold on the Amazon website. These services are highly available, self-correcting and process millions of products a day in real-time.
Before Amazon, Gaurav spent two years writing middle-tier software for an energy trading and transportation company. There he designed a graphical programming language, and built a scalable architecture on which thousands of its compiled applications can be run simultaneously. Gaurav is an alumnus of Rice University.
h3. Chuck Groom, Co-founder and Developer
Chuck designed the bulk of the BillMonk user interface and maintains the physical system infrastructure.
During his two years at Amazon.com, Chuck spearheaded the vision and design for the next generation of catalog metadata services (“what kind-of-thing is this? what can we infer about it?”) which got him thinking a lot about knowledge representation, statistics, data mining, and highly available and massive repositories. He presented a series of these proposals to Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, and ultimately received sign-off. He also whipped to A-to-z Guarantee service into shape, making it easier for customers to use, fairer to 3rd party merchants, and highly transparent to internal business teams.
Chuck was active in technical recruiting, personally interviewing over 200 candidates. Before Amazon, Chuck spent three years at Blue Mug, Inc creating applications and user interfaces for cell phones and a variety of prototype handheld devices. Chuck is an alumnus of Swarthmore College.