Official Venmo Blog

Nov 09 11

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Let Siri Carry Your Wallet: Payments at the Speed of Conversation

We have released integration with the iPhone’s personal assistant Siri. Simply ask her to pay and charge your friends. Here are some examples of how it works:

“Tell Venmo to charge Alan O’Donnell four dollars and fifty cents for an iced latte from Starbucks”

“Tell Venmo to send Andrew Staub five dollars for a beer. Thanks for building talk to pay. This is sick!”

Here is your payment grammar lesson and how it works:

“Tell Venmo” + {send or charge} + {the full name of the person you are paying} + {the amount of the payment} + {what you are paying for}

Siri will draft a text message for you to review and send to Venmo. We’ll double check your grammar and make sure you are paying or charging one of your Venmo friends. If everything looks good, we’ll pay or charge your friend and send you and Siri a confirmation message.

Requirements

- Make sure you have our number (646-863-9557) saved as “Venmo” in your phone’s address book.

- Make sure to use your friend’s full name.

- Register for Venmo by downloading our iPhone or Android app.

Protips

- You can use “pay” instead of “send” but Siri often has trouble with this word. For some reason Apple decided to optimize for the word “hey” in text messages :).

- If you want to make a payment that includes cents, use the words dollars and cents. For example, say “ten dollars and fifty cents for a burger” and not “ten fifty for a burger”. Siri will interpret “ten fifty” as $1050 and you will be eating some expensive meat.

Oct 30 11

Venmo’s First Hackathon - Oct 2011

Last Friday we held our first (of many more to come) 36-hour hackathon. We had a blast, learned a lot, and slept a little. Here’s a summary of the hacks we created!

Kortina, Shreyans, and Staub at a team meeting on Thursday morning

Venmo Live by Shreyans and Julian

It displays a map of the US (via Google Maps) and, in real time, drops a pin on the location of where a new payment occurs and where a new signup happens. The map resizes itself based on clusters of nearby payments. We’re getting an extra display for this office so we can always have this on!

a screenshot from Venmo Live

Timeflies iPhone app by Matt H and Matt D

Keep track of the Timeflies band with this free iPhone app. Watch their newest Youtube videos and follow their tweets with the app. Show your support for Timeflies by Venmo-ing in the app! It’s even open-sourced on github! Now you can finally pay them back for watching Under the Sea for the umpteenth time.

the Timeflies iPhone app in action

Commit Driven Development by Alan

You’ve heard about test driven development and maybe even readme driven development. But Alan takes it to an even higher level with commit driven development. Don’t let your followers down! Write commits before they happen to keep you on track, productive, and ahead of the trend!

Mobot by Kortina

Manage your tests and commits through gchat! When commits are pushed to the team, notifications are sent out through a team gchat and tests are automatically executed. Additionally, changes can be automatically deployed by using the mobot command in gchat. Things totally just got real.

a screenshot of the team gchat after code commits

Venmo Poker Night by Andrew Staub

Collect buy-ins and pay out winners with this app! After you clean them out, it’s even easier for them to buy back in. Watch the people join the table and stop that one guy from playing without paying.. You know who he is! Refer him to this open-sourced code on github!

Blackberry Venmo App by Jesse and John

The Blackberry app is almost done and Jesse and John learned the joy of developing for Blackberry’s. It can be best (and most accurately) explained through this comedic blog post. Though they only reached about step 40, they now have a deep respect for Blackberry developers. If you’re on a Blackberry, stay tuned for the app! Slow and steady wins the race!

Venmocorp Reimburse by Iqram

One of the many perks at Venmo is instant reimbursement for office supplies and team goods. To keep it neat and tidy, Reimburse categorizes payments and makes it even easier to get reimbursed. As an extra bonus, it has a shnazzy background too. Unfortunately it’s only an internal tool, but we thought you readers would be proud.

And final props to Venmo Underground by Jenny! Our support tools used to be a complex combination of Assistly, Asana, and email. But with Venmo Underground, it’s a one-stop shop for everything, and it looks phenomenal. Never before will helping our users be as easy as it is fun :)

a picture from late Thursday night

Venmo’s First Hackathon was a total domination! If you have any suggestions for us at the next Hackathon, contact us at support@venmo.com.

We closed out Friday night with demos and catered Sri Lankan food. It was a smashing success! Somewhere buried in our phones is a picture of Iqram and Kortina sleeping on the bed. Let’s hope it resurfaces. At one point, I could have sworn that I saw Julian go for his 3rd Chipotle burrito in those 2 days. And at 2:15am on Friday morning, the team eagerly did the most energetic shake down I’ve ever experienced. That’s Venmo, and we love what we do :)

Want to help us brew cool stuff at the Venmo labs? Check out our jobs page.

Oct 13 11

It doesn’t hurt to work at Venmo on your birthday!