PayPal Offers $150,000 In Developer Challenge 80
blackbearnh writes "As previously reported on Slashdot, PayPal recently released a series of new APIs that allow developers to embed PayPal into their web sites and applications without requiring the user to go to the PayPal web site to complete the transaction. To encourage developers to use these new APIs, PayPal is offering two prizes totaling $150,000 for interesting new applications. The entry deadline to register ideas is December 16th, and O'Reilly has an interview with the director of the PayPal Developer Network that covers the details of the contest. In it, Naveed Anwar talks about why PayPal is throwing money at developers. 'When Facebook opened up their platform, it allowed people to work in that particular environment, in the Facebook environment. When the iPhone opened up their platform, they allowed people to work in their environment which was build the applications on the iPhone. When PayPal was looking at opening up its platform, we are not limited by one particular area. We go into the enterprises. We go into social networking. We go into all the places where payment as a solution is needed. And if we can actually reduce that barrier of entry — because at the end of the day, when anyone is building out a business and anyone is building out an application, they're looking at ways of monetizing it.'"
Re:Lame way to underpay. (Score:4, Interesting)
Paypal has never been anything but a processing center. All it ever did was hold your bank accounts and Credit cards online so that you don't have to enter that number in more than one place on the internet. All it ever did was keep the #'s secure, in a sort of "I'll give paypal my money if paypal pays for the product" - thus you only ever have to trust 1 person online. If you ever thought it was anything different, you were sadly mistaken.
This new API completely removes that benefit. this makes it so that any paypal merchant can randomly charge whatever they want to my account. Previously I would have had to explicitly approve the transaction.
Now you can finally pay for a lapdance (Score:3, Interesting)