I’m looking forward to covering the X.Commerce Innovate conference later this month for Ink readers. Be sure to shoot me questions or topics you’d like me to address when I sit down with folks in San Francisco, October 12-13.

Cheers!
RBH

New Offerings Demonstrate Potential to Change the Future of Payments

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) worked with PayPal to support application payments in the Java Store Beta and enhancements to the beta user experience. A consumer-facing storefront enabling the discovery and purchase of Java™ and JavaFX™ applications, the Java Store Beta offers an unequaled distribution mechanism for reaching more than 800 million desktop Java users worldwide and driving potential revenue opportunities through the sale of innovative content.

Carlson Marketing teamed with PayPal to provide another redemption option for participants in client loyalty and engagement programs. Participants now can redeem their program points for specific PayPal dollar amounts. The money can be deposited into their own PayPal accounts or can be given as a gift. Participants simply select the PayPal reward from an online catalog, and within minutes they will receive an e-mail confirming the transaction.

ShopSavvy, the comparison shopping application with more than 3 million users worldwide, now offers mobile payments utilizing PayPal X. PayPal’s first suite of application programming interfaces (APIs), Adaptive Payments, makes it possible for ShopSavvy users to immediately purchase items through their PayPal accounts after they scan the product barcode with their mobile phone cameras.

Payvment today introduced an e-commerce application that allows anyone to easily create a retail store on Facebook. By harnessing the power of PayPal X, customers will now be able to shop from multiple vendors in a single shopping cart, turning Facebook into an online shopping mall.

MedPayOnline uses PayPal X to power its patient payment system, which addresses the payments needs of the $2.3 trillion healthcare market for patient payments. Using Adaptive Payments, the new application allows anyone to easily pay their medical providers online.

Storenvy today launched as an online store system and social shopping community, connecting independent merchants with shoppers in a social setting. Storenvy’s social shopping features allow consumers to interact and see each others’ tastes and comments on products across all stores, creating a crowd-curated selection of “Most Popular” items for new users to discover. Adaptive Payments allows Storenvy shoppers to use one shopping cart and make one payment transaction, even when buying from multiple stores or multiple countries.

Cheers!
RBH

New Capabilities for Adaptive Payments
PayPal unveiled new capabilities and enhancements for its Adaptive Payments APIs, expanding payment functionality for multiple recipients and on multiple platforms. New capabilities include:

Currency conversion: Fast, easy global payment apps, automatically converting currencies using current exchange rates.
Pay Anyone: For financial and other institutions to let their customers send money when logged in to their bank accounts. Their customers won’t need a PayPal account to use the service.
Pre-approvals: Enables developers to create reusable payments agreements between buyers and sellers. While payment approval happens online, the actual money movement can occur offline at different intervals, and through multiple devices that are not necessarily Internet-connected at the time.
Send Money: Developers can build person-to-person (P2P) solutions or business-to-business (B2B) payment applications on their platform of choice – whether it’s the mobile phone or a social networking site.
Chained Payments: Developers can take a cut or distribute funds from PayPal payments as they happen.
Parallel payments: Developers can enable buyers to send money to several people in one payment, which is ideal for purchasing multiple items from different sellers, or even for payroll applications.

Introducing Adaptive Accounts
PayPal introduced a beta of its Adaptive Accounts API to provide a streamlined signup experience for people who don’t have PayPal accounts, while maintaining security and privacy of consumer data. With the new API, developers can create PayPal accounts for their customers from within their applications.

New Pricing for Services Payments
Starting in Q2 2010, PayPal will offer pricing for developers building applications in markets that are traditionally served by cash and checks, such as rent, consulting businesses or payroll.

The introductory pricing is:
A flat fee of 50 cents for service transactions funded by a bank account or PayPal account balance, with a three-day settlement period; or a 0.75 percent fee for service transactions funded by a bank account or PayPal account balance, with instant settlement.

Mobile Embedded Payment Toolkit Beta
A key component of PayPal X will be the mobile payment software development kit (SDK), which makes it easier for developers to integrate PayPal into mobile applications to buy physical goods. With just a few lines of code, developers can add a checkout button to accept mobile payments without having to worry about collecting any financial information. The mobile SDK, which will initially support iPhone, will be available in the first half of 2010.

“Mobile transactions have been notoriously tough to monetize,” said Osama Bedier, PayPal’s vice president of platform. “With the new SDK, just tell us how much you want to get paid and what the payment is for, and the funds will be transferred in seconds, not days or weeks.”

X.com Developer Portal
PayPal also unveiled X.com, a new developer portal that contains all the information developers need to create applications built with PayPal X. All general sessions at Innovate 2009 can be viewed live from x.com, and all sessions from the conference will be available for viewing at x.com after the conference.

I’ll keep everyone posted with news from here at PayPal X Innovate 09 as it comes out.

Related Links:
http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/a-growing-paypal-could-soon-overshadow-parent-ebay/

http://mashable.com/2009/11/04/paypal-id/

http://venturebeat.com/2009/11/04/paypal-woos-developers-with-150k-challenge/

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/04/paypal-seeks-new-ways-to-use-its-payment-system/

http://www.bloggingstocks.com/2009/11/05/paypal-on-track-to-lead-ebay-opens-doors-to-outside-developers/

http://gigaom.com/2009/11/03/paypals-partially-open-platform-to-usher-in-new-payment-models-apps/

http://tamebay.com/2009/11/paypal-x-dev-con-spawns-facebook-shopping-mall.html

http://econsultancy.com/blog/4907-paypal-turns-to-developers-in-its-quest-for-world-domination

Cheers,
RBH