Silicon Valley wants you to do away with your old, beat-up leather wallet.
PayPal introduced its money transfer widget at the MobileBeat technology conference in San Francisco on Wednesday. PayPal’s new widget uses Near-Field Communications technology, which lets you pay for purchases with a wave of your smartphone.
PayPal’s widget allows for money transfers between two NFC-enabled phone holders. Say you want to transfer money to another PayPal user. They’ll request a specific amount of money from you on their phone, and after you tap your NFC-enabled phones together, the cash transfers from your PayPal account to the other.
“PayPal used to be an online company, but we see the majority of transactions are being substituted for offline transactions,” said Laura Chambers, senior director of PayPal’s mobile division, at the MobileBeat conference.
The mobile payments space is booming at the moment, with companies like Google, Intuit, Square, and of course the eBay-backed PayPal all competing for share over customer transactions. And all of them offer something a bit different. Google’s Wallet service will eventually let you pay for goods with a wave of your Android smartphone, while companies like Square aim for the small-business crowd who want to accept payments from their mobile devices. Intuit offers services similar to Square, but you’ll be able to manage your taxes and sales info with integration into its existing QuickBooks accounting software.
PayPal’s money transfer offering is a relatively small step into the mobile payments space, and the company faces lots of challenges. For one thing, there’s only one NFC-enabled phone available in the U.S. — the Samsung Nexus S. Second, PayPal’s offering isn’t as major as Google’s: PayPal allows transfers between phones, while Google is pushing for installations of NFC-capable point of sale terminals in retailers around the country. So where PayPal lets you trade digital cash with a buddy, Google wants you to be able to buy items from stores.
more at WIRED
