Twitter For Your Credit Card

Anthony Ha has an interesting story over at DigitalBeat about a new site called Blippy based on a pretty provocative idea – it allows users to share all the purchase information from one of their credit cards.

Once you buy a movie ticket from Fandango or a cup of coffee from Starbucks, Blippy automatically publishes those purchases in a stream of updates that other users can follow, Twitter-style. The idea is to share this information with your friends and maybe start conversations about what you’re buying.

The site has been in private testing for several months, but it’s starting to offer more invites to the public.

Co-founder Philip Kaplan – known for founding the F**ked Company website to mock failing companies, as well as advertising network AdBrite – told me a little more about the company’s story.

The idea was incubated at venture firm Charles River Ventures, which brought Kaplan on as an entrepreneur in residence back in June. While there, Kaplan played with different startup ideas, most of them finance-related.

Meanwhile, Charles River partner Saar Gur connected him to two young aspiring entrepreneurs down the hall, Ashvin Kumar and Chris Estreich, who were also trying to come up with the next big thing. (Kaplan says he already knew the pair from one of their projects, personalized song site GreetBeatz, because he’d offered to write heavy metal songs for GreetBeatz.)

The key insight that Kumar and Estreich developed was that a lot of the data from your credit card could be used socially. Kaplan says he liked the idea, and started to talk to them about it every day.

Photo by DigitalBeat.

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