A couple of weeks ago I attended the Open Coffee Club Brussels (which was held in combination with the Brussels Girl Geek Dinner #7). During the event we got a beta invitation for the Billy prepaid gift card that will be launched later this month.

Billy is similar to a Bongo bon. It is a gift card that you can give as a present. The big difference is that the person receiving the Billy can use it in most online stores to make any kind of purchase.

Billy is also very similar to Hallmark's e-cards because it uses a flash-heavy site where you can gift wrap your present and send it of to the recipient.

Finally, Billy is basically a fixed-value Mastercard. When you receive a Billy and you activate it you get a special temporary Mastercard credit card number that you can use in any online store that accepts Mastercard.

What I like about Billy:

• It works as advertised. The activation through SMS was quick and when I tried the Billy card in three different online stores each transaction using the temporary Mastercard was very smooth. I shopped at the Mozilla store and the Canonical store and I gave a loan at Kiva.org.

What I don't like about Billy:

• The main site uses too much flash. It's annoying, slow and prevents Firefox from remembering my userid and password. Four (4!) MB of flash is not exactly my idea of 'a gift' but apparently most/some people like it that way. At least you can switch of the music.
• When you want to give somebody a Billy there is a fixed handling fee (called 'Billy token') of 4.95 euro on top of the amount of the Billy itself (25, 50, 75, 100 or 125 euro). That's a pretty hefty sum. I know that there is also some cost when purchasing a physical voucher in any other store (gas, parking,...) but that would typically be combined with other shopping. More importantly, that cost is mostly hidden. Billy's cost is kinda 'in your face'.
• Each Billy gets its own unique Mastercard number which makes it impossible to combine multiple Billy's into one to make a larger purchase. Real soon people will be looking for online stores with products of only a couple of euro!
• If the remaining value of your Billy is less than 1 euro the Billy card expires. This means that the remaining money is lost. 'Lost' is another term for 'donated to the people behind Billy'.

One other thing I noticed is that the flash-heavy Billy site is placed on top of a Drupal 5.9 installation. This is no surprise because the site design is done by One Agency who also did a Drupal site for the RTBF.