PayPal Innovate: X marks the start

Thoughts from Day 1 of PayPal’s developers’ conference

You know you have created something important when it starts to redefine the industry conversation. Over the last few days, it became obvious PayPal is on to something with its approach to embed payments into the fabric of commerce.

This was a day of announcements and excitement at the PayPal Developers conference, with a new venue, (the Moscone Center down town San Francisco), attendance way up (over 2100 was the whisper number) ,  and score of announcements from marquee names.

In front of a packed audience, with standing room only left, Osama Bedier hosted a keynote event of replete with demonstrations and announcements. Of note:

Key Live Demonstrations:

• Creating in a matter of minutes a storefront for Facebook commerce, with Payvment

• Taking payments from a remote control while watching TV, with FourthWallMedia

• Enabling payments at the point of sales, with VeriFone

• Payments, loyalty and Facebook posting, with Bling Nation

• Integrated invoicing and payments, with Freshbooks

Key Product Announcements

• PayPal Apps will let developers embed their application and services into PayPal.com

• Mobile Express Checkout enabled merchants to rapidly create a mobile presence

• Embedded payments to streamline checkout by allowing without leaving the merchant  web site

• New digital goods payment flow allowing payments in as little as two clicks

• New micro-transaction pricing to facilitating digital commerce

• New services transaction pricing to power B2B commerce

Key Partnership Announcements

• Partnership with Discover allowing Discover cardholders to send money to anyone

• Partnership with Facebook to empower social commerce

Facebook’s  Sheryl Sandberg  declared  : “Commerce is becoming social” and “PayPal + Facebook = People”.

Mobile, Social and Local were very much the underpinning theme of these presentations and the buzz of the show. As I wandered around the conference I picked up a number of anecdotes of the momentum building around these themes:

• In a release of a new study of person to person payments, AITE Group described the opportunity as significant, close to $1 T in transactions last year, and inherently social in nature with a majority of transactions made to friends and family

• In a presentation of Mobile Express Checkout, it was noted that merchants who had tested the service saw a sales lift in the double digits

• Attendees were given a Bling tag usable for payments around Moscone Center

• In demonstrating embedded payments, Fundrzr showed the building of a charitable campaign from scratch to receiving payments in less than 10 minutes.

For someone like me who has been building cutting edge payment and commerce products for over 15 years, it was startling to witness the passage of the baton to the PayPal developer community. The energy and sense of opportunity was very real, one only had to visit the “Hackaton” room and the demo area to feel it.

As Tim O’Reilly commented in his closing keynote, innovation stems from passion, vision and the intense attention to creating viable ecosystem where the value created by a company was greater than the value it extracted. It was a stunning comment exemplifying what had been on display throughout the day, and one that should give hope to consumers and merchants that once again payment would be about helping them.

The day finished with lines of PayPal employees celebrating conference attendees and thanking them for their support. A fitting tribute after a dynamo day and another reminder of the industry changes. For when was the last time you saw that happening at a payments related conference?

Interested in learning more about the future of money?  Follow PayPalX or PRGauthier on Twitter.

Patrick Gauthier, is a payment industry executive with 20 years of experience in developing, selling and deploying around the world, new technologies for payment and commerce. Patrick is currently Head of Market Intelligence at PayPal. The views expressed in this column are that of the author only and do not necessarily reflect that of PayPal or EBay Inc. Patrick can be reached via LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/in/prxgauthier) or Twitter (PRGauthier)