This blog is about one of our guest speakers at MIT 7521 IT II Praveen Alavilli, who is a technical and developer evangelist for PayPal X (x.com). He went over the history of PayPal a little bit and how PayPal is a global e-commerce business allowing payments and money transfers to be made through the internet. On 2002 PayPal owned by eBay and its headquarters are in San Jose, California and its revenue was about $4.4 billion in 2011.
Praveen went over some of the new applications that PayPal is building on mobile devices like Mobile Express Checkout that allows customers to check out using their mobile devices. He described how PayPal Mobile Express build upon http is more efficient than Google Wallet which uses NFC (Near Field Communications) , as a user doesn’t have to wait in line to process his purchase, and just at any time can use his mobile device and check out through PayPal Mobile Express Checkout.
He mentioned PayPal recently bought Card.io which it capture credit card images for PayPal Here product, using video swipe and OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technologies. So in this way users can scan their cards with a smartphone camera and by PayPal Here process their payments. Praveen described how PayPal allows Split and Chained payments which is one of the appealing features in e-commerce.
Praveen mentioned PayPal is taking care of any security and fraud issues that may concern a payment application by using security token and standard security technologies . I really enjoyed our session and the information that Praveen provided and appreciate the time he allocated to talk with us.