PayPal Goes Mobile

Stitch_Surfs writes "PayPal has gone mobile. MobileCrunch breaks the news (with images) of PayPal's (un) surprising move onto mobile phones. According to the site, money can be sent,received and goods purchased all via PayPal from your mobile phone."

Not surprising

[turg]

I signed up for PayPal when they first started. They started out as a service for beaming payments between Palm Pilots. You put money into your PayPal account from your credit card or bank account. Then you'd sync your Palm with your PayPal account and you could beam money (via IR) to/from other peoples' Palms. And, as a secondary feature, you could transfer money to other people's accounts on the web site too.

Well, it turned out that the the secondary feature was the one that took off and the one that was originally the whole point eventually got dropped. So this is really just a return to their original concept from 8 years ago rather than some suprising new idea.

Re:Not surprising

[johnpaul191]

as much as it was a novelty, it was great. it was incredibly dorky to be at a restaurant and have one person charge the meal on a credit card and everyone else to pull out their palm pilots and beam the card owner for their portion of the bill.

i thought i heard there was some issue with security, or people not hot syncing enough or something that helped end the Palm based payment fun?

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PaypalSucks

[Poromenos1]

After reading that site and a few stories of users that have had their accounts locked by PayPal, I'm convinced that that is no rare phenomenon and I try to avoid using PayPal as much as I can.

I am eagerly looking forward to an alternative like GBuy (is it really?) so I can feel a bit safer making transactions on the web. Knowing that I might create something that finally allows me to make a decent bit of money only to have PayPal lock my account and take all of it isn't very reassuring.

TextPayMe?

[MostlyHarmless]

It sounds like they're placing themselves squarely as the 800-pound-gorilla against TextPayMe [textpayme.com] -- one of the Y Combinator [ycombinator.com]-funded startups. This may be interesting for both parties.

Number spoofing risk?

[tokengeekgrrl]

Cell phone traffic isn't encrypted, is it? Couldn't someone spoof someone else's phone number and have them send money to them and then they disable the account as soon as they've collected?

When you consider the lengths that identity thieves and phishing scams will go to, it's not completely unfeasible.

But I could be completely on crack so if what I'm saying is completely ludicrous, please disregard.

- tokengeekgrrl