PayPal Enables Peer-to-Peer Payments on Android With NFC
PayPal has doubled its mobile payments projections to $3 billion this year, and is investing heavily in new ways to make it easy to pay with the phone.
Last week, that meant buying Zong, a carrier billing provider. Today, Laura Chambers, the senior director of PayPal Mobile, demonstrated another way at VentureBeat’s MobileBeat conference in San Francisco.
The new application, which will be available later this summer, will allow users to transfer money using near field communication on the Nexus S, the first Google Android device to have NFC chips integrated. For now, the solution will only work on NFC-enabled phones — a very limited market.
In the demo between Chambers and VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall, Marshall fictitiously sent $1 million to Chambers by entering the amount into a widget on the homescreen. To activate the transfer, he tapped his NFC-enabled phone against Chambers’ phone.
The video below shows the technology in action: