The prize for the most innovative South African application using PayPal's payment platform has gone to BillBox co-creators Niel Koekemoer and Werner Janse van Rensburg.
The PayPal X/FNB Developer Challenge, which kicked off at the Silicon Cape, Cape Town, in June this year encouraged South African developers to use PayPal's application programming interfaces (APIs) to come up with innovative business ideas.
The winning application, BillBox, allows sharing of expenses and monitoring of budgets among group members.
Koekemoer and Janse van Rensburg were housemates at the time and shared normal monthly bills and expenses. They came up with the idea for BillBox as a way to simplify this process.
BillBox lets users create expense groups for a situation where costs are shared between people. In addition to letting group members request payments and record the transfer of money, the application allows users to send each other receipts and monitors who owes whom. It also provides graphs of group spending habits.
According to Koekemoer and Janse van Rensburg, development of the BillBox application took 357 hours, but they note: “Many more hours went into casual conversations, problem-solving and daydreaming.”
Their prize is an all-expenses paid trip to the PayPal X Innovate 2010 Conference in San Francisco, which features presentations from industry experts, new product announcements and interactive developer sessions.
In addition, BillBox will be automatically entered into PayPal's international X Developer Challenge.
“Our two winners are a true representation of the incredible entrepreneurial spirit and online expertise we have in SA. We are proud to have sent them to the PayPal Innovate Conference, says Chris Savides, GM of FNB Complementary Online Services.
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