December 5, 2009

New Alpha build released

We've just released a new build of the application, which can be found at http://split-the-bill.com

This build includes:

Better error handling and validation
Pop-up tips for form fields
Tweaked URLs for easier metrics gather

As always we are keen to hear from you, so send any feedback to support@split-the-bill.com

November 17, 2009

Our design elves have been busy...

Our design elves have been slaving away, coming up with all sorts of interesting designs for the site.

Unfortunately they won't let us show you all the designs (they claim they are 'naff) but they did, grudgingly, say that we can share this one with you.

What do you think?

Click here to download:

Our_design_elves_have_been_bus.zip (325 KB)

November 11, 2009

Our twitter feed is live

Yay, our twitter feed is live (and is even integrated with our blog, luv Posterous' autopost feature).

Follow us at http://twitter.com/split_the_bill

Also our design elves have been ultra busy and we have some very nice candidates for the site's look and feel. We are also planning to update the current Alpha this weekend with a couple of bug fixes and UI tweeks too.

November 8, 2009

Its Alive!!!!

Ok the Alpha of split-the-bill is alive and kicking.

Go nuts (just try not to break it too badly) by visiting: http://split-the-bill.com/alpha/

As always send your feedback to support@split-the-bill.com

November 8, 2009

Code complete

Just a short post to announce that we are code complete for the Alpha!

We should have it deployed in the next few days.

Remember if your are interested in taking part in the Alpha, send as an email at support@split-the-bill.com

November 3, 2009

So what happened to the Rackspace Cloud

I just got the an email explaining what went wrong with Rackspace yesterday. To quote:

At approximately 12:29am CST this morning, our Dallas - Fort Worth (DFW) data center experienced a power disruption, and consequently an interruption of our services. The power disruption was the result of issues during a maintenance effort that was scheduled and expected to be non-impacting.

This summer our DFW facility had power issues, and as a result, we invested significant resources to improve all aspects of our power systems. Last night, during one of these steps, we encountered issues and had a brief loss in power. The power disruption was approximately 5 minutes in duration. Despite this short power disruption, many customers experienced downtime that was significantly longer. Since the power disruption hit the core of many of our cloud services, recovery of full operations required more effort than simple recovery of power. The experience you had last night is not acceptable to us.

Here is what we know about the events:

· The scheduled maintenance was planned to occur from 12:05am - 6:05am CST in our DFW data center. This maintenance is part of a preventative maintenance schedule for several PDUs in UPS Cluster G at the DFW datacenter. The PDUs were down for a total of 5 minutes before power was restored. At approximately 12:29am CST, all PDUs behind UPS Cluster G lost power.

· Although the power outage was very brief (5 minutes), it forced a hard re-boot to occur on a portion of our cloud infrastructure. As our engineers worked to bring hardware back online, we experienced several unforeseen hardware failures. Further complicating our recovery effort, the incident also created internal DNS issues, which caused additional delays. With that said, the vast majority of cloud customers affected by this outage had service restored within one hour's time (many in as little as five minutes); however, depending upon the service, a few customers experienced service interruptions for up to few hours.

Here is how we plan to deal with it:

· We have invested massively in the DFW facility to ensure it delivers at a level you expect from Rackspace - despite last night, we feel very good about our plan and have high confidence in the DFW facility - clearly we have to prove it.

· We are reviewing our maintenance notifications - we typically do not share information on expected non-impacting events, but clearly we need to ensure we calibrate these events and are fully transparent.

· We are reviewing our procedures and systems for quickly resuming cloud operations when an unexpected event like this occurs - unexpected events will happen, our job is to minimize their impacts.

We live by high standards and clearly have not lived up to them. We welcome any feedback. If you would like a call from me, or anyone on our senior team to discuss these issues personally, please reply with a phone number.

We have work to do to earn back your trust. We will not rest until we have.

Thank you,

Emil Sayegh
General Manager, The Rackspace Cloud

November 2, 2009

Rackspace Cloud is down

Well, this is an interesting turn of events.

One of the motivations behind starting split-the-bill.com was too learn the ins and outs of running a web 2.0 startup. In this day and age the Cloud offers a fantastic ability for one to take a product to market with minimal investment and amazing speed.

To give you some idea: split-the-bill.com uses Google Apps standard for email, Posterous for this blog and Rackspace Cloud for our web servers. All told it took less the 2 hrs to setup all this infrastructure and it has (currently) a running cost of less then $50 a month.

Of course there is a downside which worries companies using the Cloud, what happens when it breaks?

This is what has just happened to our server at Rackspace Cloud. About half an hour or so ago siteuptime.com reported that one of our Rackspace Cloud based servers was down. After a bit of investigation we found that the server could not be accessed and neither could the split-the-bill.com server !

Worse yet the Rackspace admin console throws up an error when you try to view your server status and it also fails when you try raise a support ticket, which is all rather ironic. Their live chat was also overloaded but did eventually returned a canned response that basically said: "we have a problem, it effects all data centers, we don't know what it is, we are looking into it". They also direct you to monitor their status site: http://status.rackspacecloud.com/

So one day in and the site is down.... not a good start

November 2, 2009

split-the-bill: the mock-ups

Here are the mock-ups for the main pages of the app, just to whet your appetite:

Click here to download:

split-the-bill_the_mock-ups.zip (199 KB)

November 1, 2009

The cat is out of the bag

It is with great excitement (and a fair amount of trepidation) that we have decided to let the cat out of the bag and announce the imminent launch of split-the-bill.com !

So what is it? Well, have you ever paid for dinner and then had a hard time figuring out who has paid you back? Perhaps you are continuously chasing up your flat mates for their share of power bill? Maybe you are trying to figure out who has and who hasn't paid for your team building event or if everyone has chipped in for Joe's stag party? Well split-the-bill is for you...

It's very simple.

You just jump onto the site and create a "bill". Each bill gets a unique link which you send to the guilty parties with a reminder to pay. They pay up and then click on the link to record how much they have paid. Everyone gets to see who has paid and more importantly you get your money :)

[ Update: I've posted some mock-ups. Check them out here: http://blog.split-the-bill.com/split-the-bill-the-mock-ups ]

So the software is almost done and we are planning on putting out an Alpha version in the next few weeks. If you are interested in trying it out, send an email to support@split-the-bill.com and we will let you know when the Alpha is ready. We will also be keeping this blog filled with all sorts of interesting stuff so come back and check it often or subscribe to the RSS feed.

Phew, ok that's enough for now...

November 1, 2009

Getting ready for lift-off

Ok here we go... www.split-the-bill.com is getting ready to launch...