Posted by Two years ago I attended a Charity Hack at PayPals office.
It was really fun and we designed GetGiving
I learnt about PayPal’s Adaptive Payments system in its Alpha release and realised that a Mobile Payments revolution was on the way that would change EVERYTHING.
With so many companies trying to become your mobile wallet it can be hard to know which basket to put your eggs in.
I decided 2 years ago that PayPal would probably win due these factors………
– They have Appox 100 Million users unlike finance startups.
– Their brand is built on primarily on commerce unlike Google.
– They are still young enough as a business to innovate. unlike the Banks.
– They are platform agnostic unlike Apple.
– They are approachable and have committed to empower developers to create the future through X.com
– There is no barrier to signing up for small businesses unlike PDQ services.
So I threw my eggs in their basket and have never looked back.
After Apple blocked our donation app. We went back to the drawing board and designed Givey which is a FAR deeper reaching product so I am pretty happy they forced us think harder to solve the Mobile Social Giving problem.
We also designed Mosho and TouchCart from the lessons we learnt hoping that our bet would pay off……
Thankfully PayPal are beginning to make big strides into the real world.
With a REAL pop up store in Manhattan to showcase their new innovations like the one John Lunn showed us the other day at the PayPal offices in London that brings a whole new meaning to the term window shopping 🙂
And then the icing on the cake was this morning when my good friend @LukeAndrews sent me a picture of his bill from Pizza Express from the other day, which no doubt he cashed in on the Taste London card 🙂
So PayPal is getting out of the building and out of eBay and this is only just the beginning.
My guess is to get on board or get out of the way.
I have made many terrible guesses about the future but I still back this one. 🙂