PayPal and mobile operator Softbank are getting together to launch a joint venture in Japan that should extend the payment subsidiary’s reach in Asia.
It’s a 50-50 effort for PayPal, which is owned by eBay, and Softbank. Each company is investing 1 billion Japanese yen or $12.5 million into the venture and they’ll each pick three directors. Softbank Mobile’s director and senior vice president Hiroaki Kitano will be CEO of the newly formed company. On top of that, the two companies are bringing ‘PayPal Here,’ that triangular dongle that naturally invites comparisons to Square, to Japan as well. → Read More
As NFC continues to see growing adoption, we are still noticing more mobile payment solutions that don’t use the technology picking up traction — and funding: one of the latest comes from Germany, where a Berlin-based company called Orderbird has picked up a €2.7 million ($3.5 million) round for a service that lets restaurants use iOS devices to take customer food orders, send them to the kitchen and act as a “cash register” to process the payments at the end.
The round was led by Alstin, a holding company headed by German financier Carsten Maschmeyer, who invested €2.4 million, with another €300,000 coming from angels and existing strategic investors backing Orderbird. (They include Lars Kamp, Carlo Kölzer and Tom Köhl.) The company has raised €3.2 million ($4.2 million) since opening for business in February 2011. → Read More
ifeelgoods has a brilliant idea — letting you earn Facebook Credits for ecommerce purchases or following a brand on Twitter — but now it has to convince big companies and shopping sites to adopt its tech. That’s why it’s hired former Google Managing Director of Commerce Sales and leader of PayPal’s enterprise sales team Tyler Hoffman to be its new Senior Vice President of Sales.
ifeelgoods is starting to snowball, as CEO Michael Amar says 92% of customers returning to ifeelgoods and increasing their budget by 250%. Of my years in tech, this is one of the most promising startups I’ve seen. Because virtual currency is so cheap to distribute and is highly valued by some consumers, ifeelgoods could become a big disruptive force in how businesses acquire customers. → Read More
During eBay’s earnings call today, eBay CEO and President John Donahoe said that over 200,000 merchants have signed up for PayPal Here, the company’s Square-like mobile payments hardware and software platform for small businesses. We haven’t seen any sign-up numbers for the mobile payments service since PayPal revealed it was seeing 1,000 new registrants per hour for the new service.
As you may have heard, PayPal Here offers a triangular add-on that plugs into the headphone jack on your smartphone. Merchants can then accept payments by swiping cards with the thumb-sized card reader or can use the smartphone’s camera to scan credit cards (powered by Card.io), scan checks, etc. PayPal Here offers a flat rate of 2.7 percent for card swipes.
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As we heard over the past few months, PayPal is ramping up its payments options for large and small merchants. The payments giant debuted an in-store payments platform for large retailers; PayPal Here, a card swiper that attaches to a mobile phone for small businesses; and hinted at a brand new PayPal wallet. Today, PayPal is rebranding its services for small businesses as PayPal Payments, which suite of business products with three tiers of capabilities to give US small businesses multiple payment options that work for them.
Peter Karpas, North American Vice President of Customer Engagement at PayPal, tell us that this is next evolution of PayPal’s payments product for small businesses. “As the lines between online, offline and mobile are blurring, we are doing a comprehensive revamp of our products, allowing small businesses to get paid however they do business.” → Read More
There’s no shortage of apps that help people find cheap gas these days, but apps that let you pay for it? And ones that give you a discount for doing it? Sign me up. The Boston Globe’s Scott Kirsner reports that regional gas station/convenience store chain Cumberland Farms has done just that with their new SmartPay app, which in addition to letting users pay without leaving their seats, offers them a $.05 cent/gallon discount.
Here’s how it all goes down: once a driver signs in with a PayPal account, they can pull into a supported Cumberland Farms location and fire up the iOS/Android app or the mobile website. From there, the app uses the device’s GPS to hone in on their gas station, though failing that users can also input the station number. After punching in their pump number, voila — their gas charges are sent to PayPal, and users get an email receipt. → Read More
eBay CEO John Donahoe announced this morning that David Marcus, the former CEO and founder of mobile payments startup Zong and PayPal Mobile VP, will be taking over as PayPal’s president. As you may know, former president Scott Thompson departed PayPal in January to be Yahoo’s CEO. Marcus joined PayPal last year when the payments giant acquired Zong for $240 million. Marcus stepping into the top spot at PayPal is not particularly surprising considering his extensive experience in the mobile and payments world, but it’s interesting that eBay chose a Silicon Valley startup entrepreneur (as opposed to an exec with large company experience) to lead its crown jewel.
We had a chance to chat with both Donahoe and Marcus about the next era of PayPal under Marcus’ leadership. Donahoe explains to us “David is the right guy for the right time at PayPal. PayPal is on the cusp of an enormous opportunity and David is a product visionary,” he says. “He knows how to create beautiful product experiences, and can match that with PayPal’s scale.” → Read More
After former president Scott Thompson departed for the CEO role at Yahoo, PayPal has named David Marcus, the former CEO and founder of mobile payments startup Zong and PayPal Mobile VP, as President (PayPal acquired Zong last year for $240 million). Ebay CEO and acting PayPal president John Donahoe posted the news this morning in a blog post.
From PayPal’s blog post: [Marcus is] going to lead PayPal with that “founder’s perspective,” to bring start-up energy to PayPal’s unmatched global reach and digital payment capabilities. With David at the helm, we will have an even deeper commitment at PayPal, and across eBay Inc., to be a leading technology-driven and customer-focused product innovation company. We’ll continue to focus on accelerating product innovation, driving consumer engagement and creating a world where paying anytime, anywhere and any way is synonymous with PayPal. → Read More
Hot on the heels of the launch of its new Here mobile payment dongle in the U.S., PayPal is joining the ranks of companies looking to get a piece of the action in what will, this year, become the world’s largest smartphone market: China.
The company says it is “cautiously optimistic” that it will become the first non-Chinese company to get a license to process domestic electronic payments — both online and via mobile devices. This would be in addition to a business it already has in the country to process international payments. → Read More
PayPal today unveiled its new global payment platform for SMBs, PayPal Here, which brings the veteran payments solution into local stores with a new mobile app-card reader solution to rival Square. The in-store payment solution, which begins rolling out to merchants today, features a triangular card-reader, or dongle, that merchants can use to swipe cards of all varieties to start accepting mobile payments on-the-go. But one of the coolest parts of PayPal’s in-store payments solution is that, while the card reader comes in handy, it’s not explicitly required.
The new payments platform allows merchants to begin ringing up customers without ever having to use a card — all they need is their phone. This is where mobile payments technology startup Card.io comes in. The startup, which unveiled its own consumer-facing app back in January, allows merchants to make the payment process as frictionless as possible. → Read More
We’re at the PayPal event in San Francisco today where the ePayments giant has officially pulled back the curtain on its payment solution for small businesses. The news has been trickling out over the last few weeks now, as Leena reported last week on the fact that the company was prepping for the launch of an in-store payments system focused on smaller merchants. And that they have, with PayPal Here. While it remained unclear what exactly the technology was going to look like, today it’s become fully apparent that PayPal (even if not explicitly) is taking dead aim at Square.
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This just in… As we reported it would do yesterday, PayPal has today issued a significant update to its acceptable use policy regarding payments for certain erotica-themed e-books.
Now the eBay-owned payments company says that it will only prohibit using its payment system for specific books — not entire classes of books — and that it will only apply to those publications that contain pictures as well as words, and in that case only instances where those images are obscene as defined by the U.S. legal system.
This is a big reversal from the company’s policy as it set out last month, when it wrote to several e-book distributors mandating that they remove erotica covering rape, incest and bestiality from their catalogs, or face being barred from using PayPal to process orders and other transactions related to the sale of those books. → Read More
A development in the ongoing story about PayPal and requirements it made on e-book distributors to remove certain kinds of erotica from their catalogs: there are signs the eBay-owned company could be preparing to reverse its position as early as this week, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The digital rights group has been among those meeting with the payments company in recent weeks, as part of a process to get PayPal to reconsider its decision. The last meeting between the EFF and PayPal was on Friday, and its activism director, Rainey Reitman, told TechCrunch that she left with a “good feeling,” with PayPal’s general counsel indicating that they would be “discussing it internally and might even be able to make a public statement in the next week.” → Read More
We’ve been hearing recently about PayPal’s in-store payments platform for large retailers (which will soon be rolled out to small businesses as well). But we haven’t seen PayPal do much in the past few months with its plans for its digital wallet on the consumer side. We know PayPal has a major vision for how payments will be made in the future, but today, the company is giving us a glimpse of exactly what new features will be added to the platform in the coming year.
As PayPal’s director of communications Anuj Nayar tells us in an interview, “PayPal is changing, and this is the first major revamp of the core PayPal product. We’re known as an online payments brand but this is all part of PayPal becoming an actual wallet.” → Read More
In addition to partnering with large retailers, it looks like PayPal is going to be launching a set of payments offerings for small businesses as well. We just received an invitation for an event PayPal is hosting next week, which will unveil what the payments company has in store for a solution for small businesses.
We’ve heard that similar to PayPal’s recently introduced in-store payments technology for big box retailers, the company is going to be launching an in-store payments system focused on smaller merchants. It’s unclear what this technology will look like, but we’ll find out more next Thursday. → Read More
The independent book world has been beset on all sides recently. When the first e-publishers began to go to bat for independent and self-published authors, the writing world rejoiced. For too long the rapacious vanity press had taken their money and offered little in return. There is very little up-front investment for self-published authors except for a good story and a little HTML gumption and Amazon, PayPal, and Barnes & Noble (and Apple) made it easy to publish anything, any time. The market was the critic and the writer reveled in the spoils. Then things changed.
Most recently Seth Godin bumped up against Apple’s publishing guidelines when he added links to Amazon books that Apple does not sell inside his self-published e-book. There can be arguments on either side for Godin’s position that the contents of his books are his and his alone to control. However, another brewing scandal points to outright censorship. Ingrid wrote about it here but given the problems now arising with various epublishers, I thought it would be good to recap.
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Back in July, PayPal shelled out over $200 million for payments platform Zong, as a way to boost mobile payments technology. As you may know, Zong lets you pay for things, particularly virtual goods online, via direct billing to your mobile phone. According to an announcement made by eBay today, PayPal is looking to make these mobile carrier payments more available for online merchants.
According to a blog post from Zong founder and PayPal Mobile VP David Marcus, PayPal is launching an initiative to help increase the usage of carrier payments. One of the main barriers to carrier payments are lofty carrier rates. Wireless carriers have charged roughly 30-40 percent to process transactions made via mobile phone accounts, making it very difficult for mobile payment companies like Zong and competitor Boku to scale beyond virtual goods.
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Adult content has long been a big draw, and one of the most profitable, in the world of digital media, but a recent move by PayPal is a sign of how one part of that business might be facing some problems up ahead.
Smashwords, an e-book distributor that competes with Amazon, has sent out a letter to the authors, publishers and literary agents that it works with to tell them that PayPal is requiring Smashwords to remove all erotica content on its platform that contains references to bestiality, rape and incest — otherwise it will stop doing business with Smashwords altogether. The changes are due to take effect on Tuesday, February 28.
Regardless of whether you are a reader of such material or not, the move by PayPal raises questions of whether a middle-man payments company should be calling these kinds of shots over content, which some might even go so far as to call censorship — and also of the power of those payments companies when they decide to do so. → Read More
PayPal recently revealed that it was testing an in-store payments technology both via mobile and point of sale systems on a ‘friends and family’ basis at Home Depot. Initially, the pilot was only for 5 stores. Today, on eBay’s earnings call eBay President and CEO (and interim PayPal president) John Donahoe revealed that PayPal will be extending the pilot to 51 Home Depot stores in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Basically, via the pilot customers (for now, this only applies to PayPal employees) are able to pay for items via their PayPal account at Home Depot’s point of sale systems. They can either use a pin code via their mobile phone or a specialized PayPal credit card that can be swiped, the payment amount will be deducted from their PayPal account.
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At his CES keynote yesterday evening, eBay CEO (and new interim PayPal CEO) John Donahoe revealed a number of new mobile payments forecasts for both eBay and PayPal. As we heard from PayPal VP David Marcus a few days ago, PayPal surpassed its expectation of $3.5 billion in mobile payments in 2011, reaching $4 billion for the year. Donahoe said in his keynote that eBay reached $5 billion in mobile GMV (gross merchandise volume) in 2011, doubling 2010′s GMV.
He also projected yesterday that eBay would reach $8 billion in mobile GMV in 2012, and PayPal will reach $7 billion in transactions in 2012. eBay Mobile currently has more than 65 million downloads of eBay’s mobile applications across platforms. And more than 890,000 new eBay shoppers made their first eBay purchase through the company’s mobile apps in 2011, a 113% increase year over year.
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