PayPal to embed X apps in self
iPhone meets Facebook meets 'all of ecommerce'
PayPal X Innovate In Facebook-like fashion, PayPal will open its own website to third-party applications as it continues its quest to "power all of ecommerce."
At its inaugural developer conference in San Francisco on Tuesday - PayPal X Innovate 09 - the eBay-owned outfit took the beta tag off its PayPal X developer platform, a set of APIs for tapping its core payment-processing system straight from third-party apps. And as part of the announcement, vice president of platform Osama Bedier said that at some point in the unspecified future, the company would serve up APIs for plugging applications straight into PayPal.com.
The PayPal site gets about 30 million visitors a month, according to Bedier. "It's where people keep their money," he tells The Reg. "They like to go and look at it."
Put your app there, Bedier says, and you've got built-in eyeballs. "If you're building an application for, say, invoicing, and you put it on idoinvoicing.com, you still have to drive traffic there - as opposed to PayPal.com where we're got those 30 million visitors."
He couldn't help but whip out the Facebook analogy. "It's just like when you log-in to Facebook," he says. "You see the stuff Facebook does and the stuff the community does hand-in-hand."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/04/paypal_app_store/