For years, I've been going on and on with family and friends about the need for a Web site or software to track all the stuff lent to people but never returned for whatever reason. In theory, this system would have worked by creating a user-friendly database to store information about who borrowed what. When you wanted something returned, the system could manually or automatically send out an e-mail or text-message with a friendly reminder: "Hey Bob, you borrowed my lawnmower three weeks ago. Any chance of getting it back soon?". Brilliant, eh? Well, it was so brilliant, BillMonk has run with my idea. In fact, it's so close to my "vision", you'd swear they had been eavesdropping on my conversations. BillMonk also lets you track personal loans and collect payments. I'm particularly intrigued by the "Shared Bill" service in which you send an e-mail to people about splitting the cost of a bill. This would be a very interesting way to deal with people who go out for dinner in a group and instead of agreeing to split the bill equally, they ask for a menu and go over each and every item to determine their exact payment - which is always less than just splitting the bill. In most cases, this kind of behaviour is a friendship-killer.

In organizing next month's mesh conference, we've been drinking the Kool-aid by using as many Web 2.0 tools as we can. Our "portfolio" includes Writely, Writeboard, Gmail and a low-cost registration service called Mollyguard. Frankly, we were drawn to Mollyguard because it's inexpensive compared with many other the online registration service, which charge twice as for much and offer many bells and whistle you would never use. It should be interesting, however, to see how Mollyguard fares with the launch of a premium service. I've come to describe this strategic gambit as crossing the chasm from free to fee in which a service becomes wildly popular by being free before rolling out "premium services" Mollyguard is attempting to cross the chasm by offering many of the bells and whistles as its rivals - at pretty much the same prices after taking into account there are also Paypal fees on the back-end. Mollyguard's strategy is worth watching because it can now offer two tiers of services depending on the features its customer want. For customers want online registration "lite", there's the basic service (1.9% to 2.9% per transaction); for customers who want all the "bells and whistles" (4.4% to 5.4%), there's the premium service.