I visited PayPal's booth at PalmSource 99 and came away with more questions
than answers. The essence of PayPal is that you beam "e-money", for lack of
a better word, between Palm devices. You'll have an account at PayPal that
you set up by giving them a credit card number. PayPal acts as a broker
middleman to settle the transactions at the end of the day when presumably
everyone hotsyncs and downloads their transactions by phone line to PayPal's
server.
The infrastructure and security behind the system seemed a bit mysterious
especially when I asked questions like "what if I accidentally beam somone
$1000 instead of $10.00"? The answer I got after a bit of hesitation was to
call their office (which is only open M-F 7am to 6pm PST) to straighten out
the snafu.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Michael McFarland [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Wednesday, November 17, 1999 11:48 AM
> To: 'Palm Development List'
> Subject: Re: devices for ecommerce
>
> Check out PayPal, a generaly e-commerce app currently out for the Palm
> (and apparently a web-phone version is coming too). I personally find
> this
> intriguing, as you don't have to have internet access at the time of the
> transaction, but have to wonder how solid the encryption is and what
> methods people will come up with to cheat the system (ie, hard-resetting
> their device after a transaction and before reporting the transaction to
> the PayPal server). Apparently, there have been earlier e-wallet
> applications which failed, but I haven't found links to any of them. In
> any case,
>
> the PayPal website
> http://www.paypal.com/
> and an article on it
> http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/20958.html
>
> Michael
>
