pal

Max Levchin was one of the founders of PayPal, sold a slide-sharing service to Google, helped start Yelp, sits on Yahoo's board, and started HVF to fund efforts to use analog data to solve big problems. His latest company, Glow, veers off into a new area, with a mobile app that uses massive data to help families have babies.

"Having babies is a moral imperative for the human race. What's been missing for people who can't is data and financial arbitrage," Levchin said during an onstage interview at the D: All Things Digital conference here. … Read more

For years PayPal has cornered the market on sending money to friends, family members, and businesses. Last week during the chaos of Google I/O announcements, Google took a first step toward giving PayPal a run for its money by making it possible to send money via Gmail. The feature is set to roll out to all users over the coming weeks, but if you know someone who currently has it, that person can send you money (a penny works) and after you've claimed the funds the new feature will be enabled on your account as well.

The service, … Read more

SAN JOSE, CALIF. -- PayPal spotlighted its retail partners Tuesday, showing off new campaigns for its in-store purchase feature as it tries to get into 2 million locations by the end of this year.

PayPal President David Marcus said PayPal is expanding its Jamba Juice "order ahead and skip the line" feature to more of the juice chain's locations and taking the option to other businesses in the future. It's also adding RadioShack to its list of partners, with the stores featuring PalPay starting on Friday.

PayPal has 23 retail partners total, including Foot Locker, the … Read more

PayPal is taking a major leap into the payment-processing space: it's eliminating fees for businesses that sign up for its service.

The news was announced on Tuesday by PayPal president David Marcus, who said that any business that dumps its old point-of-sale (POS) services in favor of PayPal Here -- the company's mobile-payment-processing service -- or another POS offering that integrates PayPal's technology, it'll wave fees through the rest of the year.

"We will offer free credit, debit card, check, and of course PayPal processing for the remainder of the year to any qualifying U.… Read more

E-commerce site eBay looks to be moving into high gear.

CEO John Donahoe announced today that by 2015, he expects the company to be handling $300 billion in transactions per year, according to The Wall Street Journal, nearly twice what it did in 2012. That means, for 2015, between $21.5 billion and $23.5 billion in revenue from both eBay and its payments processing unit PayPal. In 2012, the company earned $14 billion in revenue.

According to the Journal, the company also plans to double the number of active users on its site over the next two years -- … Read more

Digital wallet operators, like Google, PayPal, and others, should be charged a fee for offering such a service, according to Visa CEO Charlie Scharf.

Speaking at the Barclays Emerging Payments Forum yesterday, Scharf said "it is totally appropriate" for credit card companies to charge digital wallet operators a fee on all transactions, according to Reuters, which was in attendance.

Scharf's comments come after eBay revealed in a February regulatory filing that MasterCard was planning to charge it a fee for its digital wallet service starting in June. The actual amount PayPal pays isn't expected to be … Read more

PayPal co-founder Max Levchin is bringing his e-commerce business smarts to a mobile-payments startup he's launching called Affirm, according to AllThingsD.

What's different about Affirm from other mobile-payment companies, like Square and Stripe, is that it's goal is to make payments happen with as few clicks as possible -- similar to how buying something on a desktop computer works.

"We are trying to get as close as possible to one-click, which has always been the case on the desktop," Levchin told AllThingsD. "In mobile, it has become an imperative to be able to buy … Read more

PayPal unveiled new hardware today that will allow it to take its in-person mobile payment system to Europe, expanding the lead it has in the international market on rival Square.

PayPal Here, which launched last March in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and Hong Kong, will debut in the U.K. this summer for its first foray into the European market. The eBay-owned payments processor plans to eventually offer the service to other countries on the continent.

About the size of a smartphone, the payments processor's new gadget will accept credit and debit cards under the Chip and PIN … Read more

I am always suspicious when people say they care.

Somehow, my first reaction is: "How much?"

So I feel more than a pang of sympathy for 11-year-old Emma Vermaak.

She is not the only 11-year-old to like One Direction. However, she might be the first 11-year-old who thought to use modern methods to raise money as part of the Girl Scouts' "I Care" program so troops overseas could enjoy Girl Scout cookies.

Inspired in her quest, she thought it might be an idea to use PayPal. This system is not revolutionary. It feels like it's been around since Jimmy Carter's time. Yet the Girl Scouts organization seems not to be quite a pal of it.… Read more