Today is the first day of PayPal’s much-hyped PayPal Innovate X 2009, the payments company’s first dedicated developer conference. PayPal, which reported strong earnings recently, is hoping to engage developers in producing applications on top of PayPal’s newly released API. We reported on parts of the open platform here and here. PayPal is already testing the platform with startups Payvment, FundRazr, Lottay and TwitPay. PayPal is officially opening up its PayPal X platform to developers and also unveiling additional APIs at the conference and will be presenting a roadmap for its view of the future of payments.
Taking the stage this morning for the keynote address is PayPal’s senior director of PayPal’s developer network, Naveed Anwar. He says that PayPal X, the new platform, is officially open. PayPal moves over $2200 dollars per second. John Donahoe, eBay’s CEO, takes the stage next. He says that this is an important marking point in the company’s history. The bottom line message is that working together with developers to unleash the next wave of payments technology. Donahoe admits that eBay was not know as the a bed of innovation but saw the opportunity in PayPal. Marc Andreessen has been a huge part of technology playing a growing role at eBay, says Donahoe. PayPal was given an unlimited budget to hire talent and develop key innovations.
Online payments only represent 5 percent of payments worldwide, Donahoe thinks that online payments should be higher than 20 percent. He believes consumer behavior with regard to payments will change radically in the next few years. This year the eBay app on the iPhone will do $500 million in volume, with PayPal integrated in the payments system. He says he thinks PayPal will be bigger than eBay in time, which he has said before. He wants to double PayPal’s reach in the next two years. The developers are a critically important part of PayPal’s future, with the company’s role to provide robust platforms, such as PayPal X.
Scott Thompson, PayPal’s president now takes the stage. Thompson says cash is obsolete. PayPal has been successful because the company has met customer needs for a safe secure, way to pay online. Thompson says the industry has been slow to embrace payment technologies, not because the ideas were bad but because it’s a very complicated issue.
Today, PayPal opens up its platform, called PayPal X, to all developers. X was originally PayPal’s API platform in its early days. There are more than 78 million active PayPal account in nearly 200 international markets. Thompson says that that there is a lot of opportunity in the mobile space, specially in India. But PayPal has further ambitions-to become the “wallet” that transcends across mobile, computers, and more.
Vice President of PayPal platforms, Osama Bedier, also takes the stage, says that PayPal will complete transactions valuing $70 billion dollars, which is pocket change compared to the $30 trillion that consumers spend globally. Bedier says PayPal will be introducing new APIs and pricing models.
The Adaptive Payments API is the easiest way for developers to move money. Developers can build applications including pre-approvals, currency conversions, and pay anyone, chained payments and parallel payments. PayPal is also launching Adaptive Accounts, another API that lets developers develop applications that let users just enter their PayPal username and password. PayPal is also unveiling a pricing model. The model is a $0.50 cents flat free per transaction or 0.75 percent of transaction depending on user cases.
And PayPal is even gaining traction from large tech companies to integrate the new API. This morning, Sun Microsystems announced a partnership with PayPal to support for-fee applications submitted by developers for distribution in the Java Store. Utilizing the new Adaptive Payment API from PayPal, consumers can authorize the Java Store to bill against their PayPal account so they can simply click the “Buy” button and never have to leave the store. In addition, when a customer makes a payment in the Java Store Beta, the application owner also gets paid at the time of the purchase. This way, the developer immediately receives the revenue and knows exactly how many people have purchased their application. Microsoft Azure is also integrating PayPal’s new API in its offerings.
PayPal is also seeing adoption across social networking sites growing 20 percent, month over month. Payvment, a shopping cart web service that we wrote about here, is using PayPal’s API on Facebook. Payvment lets anyone set up e-commerce retail stores on Facebook, using PayPal’s Adaptive Payments API.
ShopSavvy, which makes apps for the iPhone and Andoid, which allows users to scan a bar code and then gives you a list of pricing of the items on different e-commerce sites. Now the app is using PayPal’s API to let users buy the product they’ve scanned from a website (without having to go to the e-commerce site) directly from within the app.
And in it’s own Oprah moment, PayPal announced that it was giving away netbooks to everyone in the audience of the conference. Google made a similar move at their developer conference, giving away free Android phones.
PayPal should be bigger than eBay, because auction sites are only one place that people shop.
I so hate that whole eBay/PayPal ecosystem of monopolistic FAIL.
It’s already understood that if I sell a product on eBay for 500, I will only get ~$350 in my checking account after everything is said and done. No wonder they are seeing ’strong earnings’. If it wasn’t for paypal, ebay would have long lost the EBITDA battle against the likes of Amazon.
“We reported on parts of the open platform here and here”
Where are the links?
Here in Arlington Virgina it different than my hometown in India we done use twitter in India the same way your guys use twiter and myspace in the us I mean the other day I go to the Starbuck the lady told me to thing about it she say thing about it Momar if you dont use Twitter the same way it not going work it might work different but one mimer problem not the way your guy want to work I laugh but the true is the true so I take a sit or have a sit and thing about it.
I was watching techcam and it says “Recorded Live” isnt that an oxymoron?
Why yes, that is an oxymoron…LOL
‘Recorded Live’ typically means its un-edited.
When one of my vendors suggested that I pay him via PayPal rather than mailing a check, I reminded him that PayPal takes 8% off the top and holds his money for 5 days. “Oh yea, I guess that’s true,” he replied. The check arrived two days later.
I am amazed at how many young business people typically ask to be paid via PayPal, even when billing for a non-online service. If and when they all wake up, their profit picture might change.
8%?? did you even read the article?
$0.50 cents flat free per transaction or 0.75 percent of transaction depending on user cases.
I’m sorry, I forgot that we’re talking about the Internet. The developers aren’t going to charge their reseller clients a usage percentage, and the resellers are going to pass along the applications to their merchant customers for free.
Yeah, but when you get your invoice there are all kinds of cryptic fees added, which makes it come out to 8-10 percent.
It’s interesting and exciting to see so much attention being paid to developers in the payment space. In a way its amazing how deceptively complicated billing still is. So far the attendees and developers at Innovate 2009 are exciting, and we’re looking forward to meeting more.
We’re at the conference as well showing off Recurly. We help web service developers deploy subscription billing quickly. If you’re not at the show, you can find more info on us at:
http://recurly.com
Hmm, I wonder…. I wonder if this would constitute spam…
typo alert the FundRazr link points to Payvment
as soon as I saw the headline of the post in my techcrunch widget , I knew this post was written by Leena Rao
lol;
I will investigate using Amazon’s payment system. I hear it is good
dont see what pavyment does what other carts dont already do. paypalx needed something to hype up their platform. pathetic.
Paypal can promote and quote their positives better than I can, so I resign to my top 3 concerns about this.
#1) Greed and fraud – easier cash transfer increases the ability for fraud by bad people. This could hamper Paypal because there will be attempt to use applications to con monies in new fashions.
#2) Regulation – America has just been through (and is still going through) a very bad time with bank corruption. Regulation of money institutions are going to be a concern. While Pp has flown under the radar, too much exposure could wake up the sleeping GIANT of government regulation.
#3) Baggage – Contrary to what Paypal may feel or think…they are NOT a new brand. This brand of Paypal has a LOT of baggage. I do not think one person on the web (with a Paypal account) has not received at least ONE fake Paypal email?!? With that comes some natural push back for this plan of world domination. Some people just don’t trust the company and possibly never will.
So that is my 2 cents…I did not charge, so you can not get your money back
John (ColderICE)
http://www.ColderICE.com
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