PayPal Working On Mobile Payment Service

[mandy]

The payments subsidiary of online auction house eBay has posted ads on job boards for a business manager and a senior product manager in the 'PayPal Mobile' group.

In the ads, the company describes PayPal Mobile as "a dynamic, young 'start-up' business unit within PayPal dedicated to bringing value-added mobile payment services to consumers and merchants."

full article: http://www.finextra.com/fullstory.asp?id=14866

A rival pay-by-SMS service called TextPayMe recently started operations.

related topic: TextPayMe new text messaging-based service for sending money using mobile phones http://community.tuliptools.com/index.ph...502.0.html

[xppman]

This will be interesting.
I'm under the impression that the airways are NOT secure or can be hacked.

A would be set of high tech scammers may now just pluck transmissions
out of the air decode them, get your username and password
and maybe empty your PP account before PP even knew what hit them.

Kind of like a non secure wireless network can be tapped into by a
neighbor or laptop user passing by.

Probably not all that simple a task but seeing as I don't trust either
PayPal of ebay when it comes to "security" of my data.
I may as well stay on the negative side of the street.

No thanks.
I think I'm going to keep moving in the opposite direction
of anything with the ebay PP BRAND on it.

[mandy]

Update with more information:

Paypal, the online payment service owned by eBay Inc., has begun testing a new offering that allows people to make and receive payments using cell phones and other mobile devices.

Paypal Mobile is being tested by an unspecified number of eBay employees and will be available to the public in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom in the next few weeks...

Paypal Mobile will allow people to make person-to-person payments, buy items and donate to charities using mobile devices...

full article: http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercuryne...162583.htm

The move by PayPal, a unit of online auctioneer eBay Inc., marks a big step in bridging the worlds of e-commerce and the physical world of brick and mortar stores by giving consumers a pay as you go option via phones, analysts said...

While designed to make online payments more convenient for the nearly 100 million existing PayPal users, the move to offer a mobile payment service holds out the prospect of reaching vast markets in the developing world where phones, rather than computers, are the main way to connect to the Internet...

full article: http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsArti...nologyNews&storyID=2006-03-23T045523Z_01_N22239893_RTRIDST_0_TECH-PAYPAL-MOBILE-DC.XML

Mobile page on PayPal web site: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cm...MobileSend  --to access that page first log into your PayPal account, and then copy and paste the URL into your browser

[mandy]

PayPal has officially launched their mobile payment service:

eBay's online payment service PayPal has officially introduced PayPal Mobile, a text message-based service allowing consumers in the US and Canada to send using their mobile telephones....

Using PayPal Mobile's Text to Buy service, consumers can buy items by sending product codes via text message. Bravo, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, MTV, and the NBA Store are offering items for purchase with Text to Buy. PayPal Mobile also enables users to Text to Give to charities such as Amnesty International, Starlight Starbright and UNICEF.

full article: http://auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y06/m04/i06/s03