"X" Marks the Spot for New Paypal Development Platform

“X”. It’s a common variable used in many a code base.  It’s one of the most common variables of any code base.  It’s what counts.  That’s what Paypal wants to become in the hands of developers, as they stated in their kickoff Keynotes yesterday morning at the Paypal X Innovate developers conference in San Francisco.  Paypal is bringing back the name of their original developer platform, called “X”, to introduce new, easier, and better ways of facilitating transactions for developers.

Paypal has big visions for their new payments platform.  As Ebay CEO Jon Donahue stated, “I believe Paypal will be bigger than Ebay because Paypal can power all e-commerce”.  It would appear any rumors to Ebay selling off Paypal may be bunk in the eyes of their CEO.  Together, Paypal and its customers are working to release the next wave in payments integration. Yesterday Paypal announced a new adaptive payments platform at x.com in which developers are now going to have the capability to integrate into their own applications.  Among the examples shared:

Integration of Paypal into your online banking experience — an example was shared of a bank enabling you to pay your friends by simply visiting your bank’s website, entering the e-mail address of your friend, and sending the transaction to that friend through Paypal.  (I wish my banks allowed this!)

Facebook Integration – Payvment did a presentation of their software that enables developers and website owners to integrate an entire shopping cart experience via just a simple snippet of Javascript code.  They also announced that they are open sourcing this software for Facebook developers to also integrate this same shopping cart experience into their own Facebook apps.  (This is very valuable!)  I’ll try to do an interview with them tomorrow.

Sun and Java Integration – Sun Microsystems did a demo of their own sharing how they were using Paypal’s X Platform in their Java store

Mobile – With the launch, Paypal is launching new mobile SDKs.  They did a demo on the spot integrating a simple payment code using Paypal’s iPhone SDK in XCode.  A couple drags and drops and copies and pastes and they had a fully-integrated payment experience on the phone.

In addition to the launch of their new platform, Paypal announced a series of new payment standards.  The payments will be adaptive, depending on the amount being charged, making a very appealing option for micro-payments to even very large payments depending on the size of the transaction.  In addition, developers will be able to decide who pays the commission, something different from their current developer platform, meaning the business itself does not have to pay the commission.  The commission can be paid by either the seller or the buyer, ensuring new and creative ways of facilitating payment transactions.

Paypal’s new X platform of course compares with Amazon’s Flexible Payment System.  Later today I’ll do a post comparing the two as I’m able to gather more data.  With the new platform it would seem that Paypal is putting the pressure on Amazon and stepping up the game of finally getting rid of the cash in your wallet in favor of much easier payment services in the cloud.

I look forward to sharing more from the conference.  I’m very intrigued by some of the Facebook solutions, as well as Twitter payment systems and I’ll share those as I get them.  I’ll also be watching the various ways other companies are utilizing the platform.

I truly believe we’re on the cusp of an entirely new wave of payments.  The competition is on in full strength at Paypal X Innovate and I can’t wait to see what comes of it.

Here are a few Cinch recordings I did of the keynotes in case you missed them:

http://www.cinchcast.com/user/default.aspx?albumUrl=Paypal-X-Innovate