Buxter is here - some words from the team

Yesterday marked the launch of new payment service Buxter. To give you a peek behind the scenes we got ClickandBuy's own Head of Product Marketing Christian von Hammel-Bonten and Head of Software Development Andrei Martchouk to share some background information about the product.

Question: So, today is Buxter's birthday, how do you feel about it?

Christian: Finally we are out there. We worked hard for the last months to get it done. We hope the users will love it and use it for many circumstances. And yes, we are now waiting for developers to join buxter.

We welcome your feedback on the app. We know that not everything is absolutely perfect yet but we will work hard to improve the product day by day. But first of all we will celebrate the going-live before we go back to improve the product for our customers.

Question: Can you quickly sum up what Buxter is for a user that is not familiar with Facebook or social networks?

Christian: Buxter is made for two things: share money with your friends as well as purchase items in Facebook apps. Users which are not familiar with Facebook or social networks can use those platforms to connect with their friends and use Buxter to send, receive or request money from friends. So users can use Facebook and Buxter to share the money for joint activities e.g. cinema visits, dinners or just to collect money from their friends for their next birthday gift. Whatever users like! Doing all this with traditional banking means you need to share account data, access the online banking of your financial institution, and more ... so we make it much easier, more convenient!

Question: How long did it take you to take Buxter from concept to implementation?

Andrei: We worked 4 months on and off. At first it was only three days a week, then it became a first class project because of all the details that needed to be taken into account.

Question: Why is the application called Buxter?

Christian: Buxter is actually a play on words. You pay with your "Bucks" (N.B.: colloquial term for money), so the application that distributes or collects money becomes the "Buckster" in newspeak so to say - and to add a little fun to the name we finally dubbed it "Buxter".

Question: How do you think the inclusion of payment to the social world will change things in the next 2 to 5 years?

Christian: As we can see from many activities, news and figures Facebook is transitioning from a pure social network into a social economy. Virtual goods have been the first items purchased in games presented on Facebook, but in future we will see more e-commerce activities on the platform. Right now users are directed from the platform to storefronts but we believe storefronts will move onto Facebook.

Question: What was your initial inspiration in the creation of Buxter?

Andrei: I think the idea really popped into our minds, when we saw the amount of really great user generated content out there in absolutely fabulous communities on the one hand and the total lack of payment systems that use real money to conduct transactions. We just knew that a lot of the things that developers were creating had tremendous monetization potential. That's when we started laying out our blueprints.

Question: What would be your word of advice for aspiring Facebook application programmers regarding payment?

Andrei: I think app developers show tremendous amounts of creativity and Facebook offers an excellent eco system for developers to create value. With Buxter we are now offering an easy, affordable and integrated payment system to help monetize this kind of creativity. It's time developers get paid for their hard work.

Question: Currently there is a java client for buxter that can be integrated by third party developers. Which other languages will be supported in the future?

Andrei: The java client is an open source community product. Let's see what the community will produce in the future. A PHP client is on it's way as we speak and there are talks of a .NET and even a Perl client library. We consciously chose to make the WSDL and XSD Schema publicly available, so no developer is left out because of programming language barriers.

Question: What is the most important aspect of Buxter?

Christian: Simplicity. Sharing the status, photos, comments is very easy on Facebook and so must “money sharing” be. With a few clicks you can send, or request money – as easy as possible. First reactions show that user sometimes feel it is almost too easy. So if someone finds a way to make it even easier, I will personally send him some “bux”.