So far, it has deployed at 2,000 Home Depots and has plans to be at 20 major retailers by the end of the year.

Stay tuned as we cover the announcements live.

10:10 am: “Midmarket businesses represent a third of the U.S. economy, and we looked at our capability and decided to partner rather than build,” explains PayPal president David Marcus.

So rather than ripping out their existing systems, the new stuff integrates with existing point-of-sale systems.

The POS software partners are: Vend, Erply, shopKeepPOS and Leapset.

That plugs PayPal into 50,000 merchants across the country, Marcus said. And that’s added to VeriFone and Equinox POS terminal manufacturers, announced this morning, in addition to an existing relationship with Ingenico.

Cue video of the owner of a PayPal-enabled shop full of cute dresses, who says she likes seeing her customers’ faces on the register, emailing them receipts and knowing their purchase history.

Next topic: large retailers. Don Kingsborough, VP of retail and prepaid, takes the stage.

Physical retail and offline retail is no longer about “location, location, location,” but instead about access to customers, Kingsborough posits.

Kingsborough pokes fun at Google’s mobile wallet pronouncement last year in New York (not by name, but it’s obvious), and other competitors’ tests, saying PayPal is much closer to ubiquity.

PayPal’s big partner so far has been Home Depot, so it trots out the company’s Dwaine Kimmet, treasurer and VP of financial services.

10:28 am: Kimmet says PayPal has been a good partner for 1) improving and speeding up checkout 2) combating bank card acceptance costs and 3) providing value to everyone.

That last one sounds really vague, but he’s elaborating. Kimmet gives the example of how text messaging around transactions gives both added security as well as convenience for customers.

Kingsborough is back to give a list of the first 15 retailers, and says some of them will be launching in the next few weeks. This is the meat of the announcement we were expecting. Office Depot, American Eagle Outfitters, Barnes & Noble, Jamba Juice, Foot Locker, J.C. Penney, Guitar Center, Jos. A. Bank, Aeropostale, Nine West, Advance Auto Parts and TigerDirect are the ones I could get before the slide changed.

Now for a string of video testimonials from people like J.C. Penney CTO Kristen Blum. But CEO of Jamba Juice James White is here in person.

White talks about the convergence of online and offline, customer satisfaction, incremental traffic and brand strengthening, while my mind wanders to flavors of smoothies.

Marcus is back to recap. His big theme is scale, and he says that word a bunch of times to describe PayPal’s different categories: online, mobile, different sizes of businesses.

The offline launch will enable PayPal to tap into a market that’s 17 times as large as what it has today, Marcus says.

That was short and sweet. PayPal had given a target of 20 major retailers by year’s end, so announcing 15 in May in addition to Home Depot is pretty far along.

10:55 am: Okay, got the full list of retailers. Here they are: Abercrombie & Fitch, Advance Auto Parts, Aéropostale, American Eagle Outfitters, Barnes & Noble, Foot Locker, Guitar Center, Jamba Juice, J.C. Penney, Jos. A. Bank Clothiers, Nine West, Office Depot, Rooms To Go, Tiger Direct and Toys “R” Us.

That list includes some overlap with Google Wallet, including American Eagle Outfitters, Foot Locker and Jamba Juice. It seems clear that retailers are willing to try multiple strategies to see what works best.

The Atlanta-based company’s mobile app tries to be a resource to consumers who are looking for local merchants and events, sort of like the Web’s original CitySearch service from years ago — except that it’s on mobile. The app also distributes coupons to restaurants, but instead of charging consumers for the deals, like Groupon does, they are free, and merchants pay a flat rate to Scoutmob each time one is redeemed.

Investors in the company’s second round include AOL Ventures, New Atlantic Ventures, Capital Broadcasting, Cox Enterprises and Thrillist CEO Ben Lerer. To date, Scoutmob has raised $5 million, which means that even if it wanted to, it doesn’t have the resources to go up against Groupon and LivingSocial.

In an interview, Scoutmob co-founder Michael Tavani said the company gets lumped into the daily deals category, but said that from day one, “we tried to differentiate ourselves and to be more of a mobile company.”

So far, the strategy has worked.

The app, which is available free on iOS, BlackBerry and Android, has 1.2 million users who have redeemed one million offers. To date, the company has launched in 10 cities, with varying success rates. Some markets, like Seattle, don’t have many deals yet, while other cities, like Atlanta or Washington, D.C., are used more.

Because of its emphasis on mobile, the company was also able to to score a partnership with payment processing company First Data Corporation.

“It’s crazy, we are a two-and-a-half year-old company, and every week we have the largest payment companies in the world contacting us,” Tavani said. ”They are worried that if they don’t have mobile engagement, then what do they have?”

First Data processes about 55 percent of all transactions in the U.S., and will help Scoutmob close the loop of offering a discount, making a purchase and earning loyalty points.

The new funding will be used to support the company’s next wave of product development, which will include building out a mobile rewards program with the help of First Data and other payment companies it signs up.

Tavani said it will work like this: When users make a purchase at a Scoutmob location using a credit card, they’ll accrue points automatically. Once enough points have been accumulated, they can be redeemed at any Scoutmob retail location.

Unlike traditional loyalty programs, which require consumers to go to the same coffee shop 10 times in order to earn a free coffee, Scoutmob will let consumers earn and redeem points by visiting any merchant in its network. It’s similar to frequent flyer programs, where miles can be earned at a variety of merchants and then redeemed at a handful of airlines.

“We want to be the equivalent of an airline reward program, but for local,” Tavani said. “That’s exactly what we want to be.”

Scoutmob has landed in a sector spanning local businesses and mobile payments, which is ripe from innovation and extremely crowded by well-funded start-ups and massively large incumbents. But Tavani argues that it’s a level playing field.

“There’s going to be multiple players and lots of winners,” he said. “Groupon and LivingSocial are two with a gigantic lead. But we can go out and visit merchants today — there’s no one preventing us from having those conversations.”

The partnerships are important because it makes rolling out PayPal’s in-store payments technology to retailers much easier.

PayPal is hosting an event at its San Jose headquarters later this morning to announce the next batch of retailers that are adopting the company’s in-store payments solution. AllThingsD’s Liz Gannes will be there to cover the announcements live, starting at 10 am PT.

To date, PayPal has deployed its service to all 2,000 Home Depots, but it has a long way to go in meeting its goal of having 20 major retailers by the end of the year.

One reason why PayPal is able to deploy its services to retailers so quickly is because it only requires sending out a software update to the retailers’ terminals — in other words, retailers won’t have to purchase all new hardware. This morning, PayPal confirmed it has signed up VeriFone and Equinox Payments, the largest and third-largest providers, respectively, which will handle those software updates. PayPal already had a relationship with Ingenico, the second-largest provider.

The relationships inked today are focused on solving back-end integration problems for merchants. But the front-end experience is all about the consumer.

At participating stores, consumers will be able to pay with PayPal by either using a PayPal-issued credit card or by entering a mobile phone number and PIN code into the terminal. Down the road, PayPal could also support near field communication technology.

All told, the three terminal providers manage about roughly 40 million terminals worldwide, representing a large majority of the terminals in existence.

In an invitation sent to All Things D, the company says: “Meet PayPal’s new president, David Marcus; be the first to speak to PayPal’s new, brand-name retail partners; and get an exclusive sneak peek at how PayPal plans to make payments easier than ever for tens of thousands of mid-size merchants.”

The two-and-a-half-hour event will take place on Thursday at the company’s San Jose campus.

It’s unclear which retailers will be on hand, but so far, the company has been working with major retailers, like Home Depot, and there have been other unconfirmed reports of a relationship with Office Depot.

To date, eBay’s CEO John Donahoe has been careful to characterize this year as an experimental period, where the company will be laying the groundwork for its entrance into the physical payments space with several deployments. It is not banking on scaling the operation until the following year.

Right now, PayPal has presented two solutions to retailers, including a plastic credit card that allows purchases to be charged to a PayPal account and a mobile payments solution, which allows customers to enter their mobile phone number and a PIN into the payment terminal without the need for the phone to be present at the time of purchase.

The approach is much different than what Google Wallet is pitching, which ironically launched its product exactly a year ago next week. Google’s deployments, which relied on near field communication technology, have been hindered by low adoption by both retailers and the carriers.

The joint venture will be called PayPal Japan, and while the details are a little bit fuzzy, the two companies say they are both committed to investing $12.5 million into the entity. Softbank Mobile’s SVP and director Hiroaki Kitano is expected to be the joint venture’s CEO.

As part of the announcement, PayPal and SoftBank said Japan will be the fifth country to receive PayPal Here, the mobile payments service that allows merchants to accept credit cards using a cellphone and a small magnetic reader attached to the headphone jack.

The service has already launched in the U.S., Canada, Hong Kong and Australia. Japan is the first market where PayPal has formed a joint venture and partnered with a wireless carrier for the launch.

The two announcements are being made in Tokyo today at a press event with eBay’s CEO John Donahoe and PayPal’s President David Marcus, along with Masayoshi Son, SoftBank’s CEO and PayPal Japan’s CEO Kitano.

SoftBank is one of the largest wireless carriers in Japan with 29 million mobile subscribers, making it a good fit for helping PayPal to get to know the local market. PayPal will also be able to tap into the Japanese carrier’s network of retail stores to help with the distribution of the card readers.

Together, the two companies said they expect to displace cash transactions in Japan, but clearly, the partnership could address other digital wallet solutions in the future.

The global payments provider is making the announcement tonight at a special event tied to CTIA, the wireless industry’s annual conference in New Orleans.

MasterCard is the latest — but probably not the last — to unveil its plans for the future of credit card transactions.

To date, a host of other competitors, spanning Visa, American Express, PayPal, Google and the U.S. wireless carriers, have also made announcements.

While all of the payment companies are approaching the digital wallet space with a slightly different product, from the consumer’s perspective they all end up looking somewhat the same — like PayPal.

In the case of MasterCard, PayPass Wallet will allow consumers to buy things online without having to memorize a 16-digit card number or in person by tapping a payment terminal with their phone. The solution is similar to Visa’s V.me digital wallet and American Express’s Serve-branded wallet.

For example, when checking out online with retailers that support PayPass, consumers can choose to enter a username and password to access their wallet. The PayPass Wallet will support multiple accounts, including competing payment providers.

“We spent a lot of time on the underlying technology,” said Ed McLaughlin, MasterCard’s chief emerging payments officer, in an interview. “It is designed for our partners to make sure consumers have a great experience online or in-store on your app. The ability to use any device you have and any account you’d want to invoke is a different approach to the closed-loop accounts.”

MasterCard will allow consumers to sign up for the wallet on its site, but it is primarily relying on banks to get users interested. This summer, it will be going live with the help of a dozen or so banks worldwide, including Citibank. Other major merchants are committing to adding PayPass to their online checkout systems, including American Airlines, Barnes & Noble and Newegg.

Mark Hung, a research director at Gartner, said it’s natural for MasterCard, American Express and Visa to move from the physical world of payments to online because consumers are already entering their credit card number online to check out. “They would like to see the same user experience, whether they are transacting online or offline,” he said.

With banks and retailers on board, Rick Oglesby, a senior analyst with Aite Group, said the focus for MasterCard will have to be on getting consumers interested in signing up.

“There’s definitely going to be some risk of consumer confusion,” Oglesby said, given the dozen of digital wallet options. “They are going to have to invest quite a lot in branding. … Even though the traditional payment companies are entering the space, the brands are relatively unknown. There will be confusion for consumers and merchants alike, and therefore, will require a signficant investment in terms of investing in new brands.”

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Today, the San Francisco company says that Sprint is coming on board to join the three other major U.S. carriers: Verizon Wireless, AT&T and T-Mobile.

While the partnership provides additional momentum for Boku, the company still has a way to go before consumers are charging all sorts of purchases to their carrier bills. Today, the majority of Boku-paid purchases are for digital goods, such as in-game currency like Facebook Credits, or virtual goods in social games from companies like Zynga.

In an interview, Boku president Ron Hirson explained that it will still be another year or so before it starts seeing physical goods like clothing or electronics being charged to a carrier bill. For that to happen, carriers will have to drop the rates even lower than what they are charging today in order to be on par with Visa or MasterCard.

Over the past two years, Hirson said, prices already have dropped from roughly 40 percent to somewhere in the “teens.”

“We are proving ourselves out, and showing to the carrier that with each incremental drop, we are growing the pie,” he said.

The next likely product category to adopt carrier billing, he said, is digital content, including music, books, or physical tickets for public transportation or concerts. Those items have a big enough profit margin to make paying slightly higher transaction fees affordable.

Other companies in the carrier billing space include Mopay, BilltoMobile and Zong, which eBay’s PayPal acquired last year. Boku strengthened its position earlier this year when it raised $35 million in fresh capital.

While carrier billing has been slow to take off, Hirson said the company believes it will be a huge opportunity because of the convenience factor. To purchase something, users enter their phone number, and then authenticate that payment via text message.

Boku said today that it also signed up a carrier-billing partnership with Deutsche Telekom in Germany, meaning that it is now processing transactions with every major carrier in France, Germany, the U.K. and the U.S.

The company also announced that it has added two executives to its team: Jon Prideaux, the former EVP at Visa, is joining as chief business officer; and Stuart Neal, the former managing director of international development for Barclaycard, is joining as SVP of Business Development.

In an interview, Joel Anderson, president and CEO of Walmart.com, said the new feature is targeting people who don’t have access to debit or credit cards.

“The fact that only 15 percent of our transactions are done in the form of credit at our stores means there’s a large percentage of Walmart customers who are dependent on cash to transact online. We definitely think it is a big opportunity,” he said.

When using “Pay with Cash,” customers purchase items online and then have 48 hours to go to a local Walmart store or a Walmart Neighborhood Market to pay for the order. Once the order is paid for, the items will then ship.

The concept is fairly simple in a world where so much energy is being focused on futuristic stuff, like waving your mobile phone to pay for things and digital wallets.

But by opening up the site to cash-only users, Anderson said customers will now have access to the hundreds of thousands of items that are not carried in the store. Additionally, if it is a gift, they will no longer have to buy an item in the store and ship it themselves.

Anderson said Walmart built the technology in-house, but other services are cropping up that offer similar benefits.

For instance, Mountain View, Calif.-based PayNearMe allows people to make purchases at various online retailers and pay for them at 7-11’s, where a clerk scans a barcode and collects the cash.

Asa Mathat / AllThingsD.com

Or, at least, that was the undertone of eBay’s conference call yesterday.

The company reported strong first-quarter results, beating both top- and bottom-line projections. It also raised guidance for the year, and said its business is stronger than it has been in five years.

“Our marketplaces business has turned the corner, shifting from defense to offense, and is delivering accelerating results,” said eBay’s CEO John Donahoe in the call.

This morning, the San Jose company’s stock was up nearly 16 percent, soaring to $41.58 a share. The rally easily pushes the company’s stock past its previous 52-week high of $38.18.

A number of years ago, eBay had hit rock bottom, sort of like Yahoo or AOL today.

Since then, Donahoe has been working hard to reinvent the entire eBay.com experience. He says the first quarter results are the first indication that the work is starting to pay off.

“It’s a significantly improved experience, and it’s not just current users, but it’s new users, who are coming to eBay and saying they really like it — maybe they haven’t been here in 10 years, but they are saying ‘Wow, this is different,’” Donahoe said in an interview. ”The pace of innovation is accelerating.”

The revival was fueled by a new TV advertising campaign around the holidays that had the tagline “Get it new, get it now,” which highlighted the company’s fixed price business. During the quarter, the company’s fixed priced business grew 18 percent. The company said the number of new buyers on the site also was up 9.5 percent in the quarter.

The company’s first quarter revenues totaled $3.3 billion, an increase of 29 percent year over year. For the same period, net income totaled $570 million, increasing 20 percent.

The strong results were attributable to the turnaround in its marketplaces business, but also PayPal and the recently acquired GSI Commerce division.

During the quarter, PayPal revenue increased 32 percent year over year to $1.3 billion, and GSI generated $715 million in merchandise sales, up 26 percent over the same period a year earlier.

In addition to conducting a turnaround, eBay is also aggressively pushing into new markets.

With PayPal, it’s rolling out new payments services, like mobile payments and in-store payments at check-out. With the help of GSI and a new division called X.commerce, the company is also concentrating on building tools that third-party offline and online retailers can use to more effectively compete against Amazon.

It is both of those businesses that Donahoe is tremendously excited about.

Yesterday, I reported that Square, which is a start-up in the mobile payments space, was attempting to raise capital at a $4 billion valuation — providing some validation to a similar PayPal product called Here.

“What I’m enormously excited about is I think PayPal Here has real capabilities that are even better than Square’s,” he said. “I think there’s enormous growth in that sector.”

During the quarter, the company’s PayPal division rolled out in-store checkout at 2,000 Home Depots and PayPal Here, a new service for merchants that allows them to swipe credit cards using a mobile phone.

PayPal Here is competing against Square, which I reported today is seeking funding at a $4 billion valuation.

Because these offerings are so new, eBay does not currently include any potential revenue in its forecast. It may continue to say today that it is too early to tell what impact, if any, is happening on the business.

“We believe new product launches (in-store check out, Mobile offerings, PayPal Here) could present some wildcard upside to 2012 guidance,” said Citi analyst Mark Mahaney in a note to investors.

Analysts, on average, expect eBay to report earnings of 52 cents per share on revenue of $3.15 billion, according to a poll by FactSet.

Those results are on the high side of eBay’s own forecast, which is estimating revenue in the range of $3.05 million to $3.15 million, with earnings per share of 50 cents to 51 cents, not including some expenses.

Analysts will also be looking to see how the transformation of its core marketplaces business is going, and how well its acquisition of GSI business is progressing. Going forward, the company wants to leverage its expertise in both e-commerce and payments to provide tools to third-party retailers that helps them fend off competitors, like Amazon.com.

The company, which will release earnings after the bell, is trading down six cents at $36.03 a share. The stock recently hit a 52-week high of $38.18.

If the company is successful, it will have quadrupled its worth since raising $100 million at a $1 billion valuation only 10 months ago.

While that would be astonishing for a three-year-old company, it’s important to note that negotiations continue, and that investors could ultimately value the company at a slightly more modest number (hmm, like $3 billion?!).

A Square spokesman declined to comment.

Square, which was founded by Twitter inventor Jack Dorsey, has quickly made accepting credit cards via a mobile phone into a mainstream and affordable concept for small merchants.

Over the past year, it has quickly expanded beyond handing out magnetic-swipe readers to offer more robust experiences for both consumers and merchants, including software on the Apple iPad that acts like a register, and software on the iPhone that is a virtual wallet.

The payments method has received a warm reception from mostly small businesses, including taxicabs, food trucks, coffee shops and even lawyers and accountants.

The rumors of Square looking to raise more capital started spreading after Owen Thomas, formerly of the Daily Dot, noticed that Dorsey and Square’s COO Keith Rabois were in Boston and Baltimore, where many institutional investors are based. Thomas called Legg Mason, which confirmed it was looking at the San Francisco company.

Previous investors in Square’s three rounds, totaling roughly $137 million, include Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Tiger Global Management, Sequoia Capital, Khosla Ventures, Visa and well-known entrepreneur Richard Branson.

The big question is whether Square will be able to demand such a hefty valuation.

To determine that, based on what is known about the company, I did some back-of-the napkin calculations to come up with its annual revenue.

Last month, the company said it is now processing $4 billion in annual transactions. Since we know that Square charges 2.75 percent per swiped transaction, and 3.5 percent plus 15 cents per keyed-in transaction, we can start to get a better picture of its finances.

Let’s assume that a quarter of the company’s transactions are keyed in — which demands the higher rate. That would mean the company’s revenue would total nearly $83 million for swiped transactions, and $35 million for keyed-in transactions. Because of the additional 15-cent fee per transaction, let’s add another $15 million (which might be generous, but would break down to 100 million transactions at $10 apiece).

In all, the company’s annual revenue would then be close to $122 million.

Most, but not all of that revenue, is then handed over to the credit card companies for processing fees.

To be sure, the company has grown quickly since its inception, and has its eyes set on the very large point-of-sales market. This year, Square said it had plans to expand internationally, and has just hired a new executive from PayPal to take the lead on the effort. In the future it could also generate revenue from advertising or other loyalty programs, although it does not today.

But, by at least one historical measure, the valuation is rich beyond belief.

PayPal, which was also looking to disrupt the banking industry by enabling peer-to-peer payments online, was sold for $1.5 billion to eBay in 2002, just months after going public at a valuation of nearly $800 million.

At the time it went public, the company was roughly doubling year over year and had generated $103.7 million in 2001, its first full year of operations — or slightly less than Square’s estimated revenues.

Much like PayPal back then, Square faces intense competition, making alliances with much larger companies or raising big war chests critically important.

Square faces stiff competition and pricing pressure from Intuit, eBay’s PayPal, Google and other upstarts, like Pay Anywhere.

Still, it has made a splash that is seeing major reverberations around the sector, which a big valuation will make larger still.

In a survey of technology experts and stakeholders, conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center, 65 percent of people said they believe that mobile payment technology will be widespread by 2020.

Meanwhile, it found a dissenting view, with 33 percent of those same stakeholders believing it will take longer because people will resist technology that wants to learn everything about their personal purchasing habits.

Relatively few people believed that cash or credit cards will disappear entirely.

It’s unclear whether the 2020 date is optimistic or seems too far out given that so many companies are investing aggressively today. PayPal and Google are the two most notable technology companies going after the opportunity, but so are the incumbents, including Visa, MasterCard and American Express. Additionally, the U.S. wireless carriers are mapping out their own plans through a joint venture called Isis.

As part of the report, Pew published remarks from a few respondents:

Google’s Chief Economist Hal Varian said: “The 2020 date might be a bit optimistic, but I’m sure that this will happen. What is in your wallet now? Identification, payment, and personal items. All this will easily fit in your mobile device and will inevitably do so.”

Susan Crawford, professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, put it more practically: “There is nothing more imaginary than a monetary system. … Of course we’ll move to even more abstract representations of value. Other countries are already content to use their phones; we’ll catch up eventually.”

In a blog post, Google disclosed the purchase but did not reveal the terms. The New York-based company was working on a number of payment technologies, including prepaid and gift cards.

It is no secret that Google Wallet has had a difficult time since launching about a year ago.

Since then, any momentum it had created was squelched when it failed to secure partnerships with the four major wireless providers in the U.S. Today, it only works on a handful of Android smartphones sold by Sprint. Other carriers — most notably, Verizon Wireless — have refused to adopt the Wallet and instead are working on their own mobile payments strategy in a joint venture called ISIS.

Additionally, the Google Wallet technology relies on near field communication, or NFC, which is not available at all retailers or embedded in many phones.

In the meantime, other companies have had some successes. EBay’s PayPal has rolled out its payment technology in all 2,000 Home Depots, and other companies, like Square, are going after the small-to-medium-sized businesses.

Google has also faced a number of internal setbacks, including a couple of departures from the team, such as the resignation of Vikas Gupta, who was the head of consumer payments, and the reassignment of Stephanie Tilenius. Additionally, it was reported today that Google Wallet’s co-founding engineer Rob von Behren has joined Square, according to NFC Times.

Osama Bedier, Google wallet and payments VP, wrote in the blog post that TxVia has partnerships with some of the industry’s best-known brands and manages more than 100 million accounts.

“Their leadership team has played an instrumental role in defining the fast-growing prepaid card segment of emerging payments,” he said. “We’ve worked closely with TxVia over the last year, and they’re a forward-thinking team that will help us take the next steps in realizing the future of commerce. We welcome the TxVia team to Google.”

Called Serve, it is competing head-on with eBay’s own PayPal, as American Express attempts to expand its audience beyond briefcase-toting corporate users.

At eBay, Sample was the CTO of X.commerce, the open commerce platform the company unveiled late last year that gives technology tools to retailers at no cost. Prior to eBay, Sample was a senior executive at Yahoo, where he led the open, social and participation platforms. He left Yahoo in August 2010.

Sample’s technical expertise is focused on developing and building platforms and products for emerging technologies.

Serve is a complex platform that allows consumers to make purchases, take cash withdrawals from ATMs and make person-to-person payments from their computer or their phone.

The offering is fairly complex because it can be funded by a user’s bank account or credit or debit card — even from one of the company’s major competitors, like Visa or MasterCard.

In the future, American Express envisions expanding the platform to mobile phones, using near field communication or other technology.

Given eBay and PayPal’s extensive knowledge in the digital payments arena, many of its executives have left the company to explore the endless number of opportunities sprouting up.

Recently, Alyssa Cutright, a 12-year veteran of PayPal, left to join Square, a payments company in San Francisco; and of course, PayPal President Scott Thompson left at the end of last year to join Yahoo as CEO. Last week, eBay named David Marcus as his replacement.

True to his word, the entrepreneur has done a lot in the past eight months.

He sold his start-up to eBay for $240 million; became PayPal’s VP of Mobile; and launched PayPal’s mobile payments service, called Here. Now, he’s been named president of PayPal. The position opened up in January, after Scott Thompson stepped down to become CEO of Yahoo.

Now, with his appointment, Marcus’s list of things to do grows a lot longer.

In an interview, eBay CEO John Donohoe emphasized that what PayPal needs more than ever is an entrepreneur at the helm, one who can take advantage of all the opportunities that lie ahead.

“It’s the right time for PayPal to combine the global scale and reach with a product guy and entrepreneur like David, who is going to take PayPal to the next level,” he said.

PayPal, which is eBay’s fastest-growing division, is pushing into two new hot areas: Mobile payment and point-of-sale.

Mobile payments are taking off as people shop online from their phones and tablets, while offline is a massive opportunity dominated by the Visas and MasterCards of the world.

It’s hard to put a dollar figure on the market opportunity, but PayPal tries putting it in perspective.

In mobile alone, it expects payment volume to hit $7 billion this year, up from $150 million in 2009. For point-of-sale, it will double PayPal’s $70 billion business if it captures 2 percent of all sales. If it captures 4 percent, it will triple it.

Before joining PayPal, Marcus was the founder and CEO of Zong, a mobile payments company that was building a platform that allowed users to charge purchases to their carrier bill. Today, PayPal uses Zong’s platform for mobile payments, and is also leveraging it for its offline payments business. For instance, when using PayPal to pay at the register, users don’t need to have their wallet or phone with them. They can simply enter a phone number and PIN to pay. That technology is live today at more than 2,000 Home Depots.

Donahoe said he was impressed by Marcus when eBay was still in talks to acquire Zong.

“He really felt deeply that if he could get Zong to PayPal’s scale that we could do extraordinary things,” Donohoe said. “From the moment he joined, it’s been fun to watch an innovator who’s been recognizing that he can innovate at scale.”

Over the past seven months, Marcus has been charged with the launch of PayPal Here, which allows small-to-medium-size merchants to accept payments using a small dongle plugged into a smartphone. The service, which launched earlier this month, is nearly identical to a service offered by Square, a start-up founded by Twitter’s Jack Dorsey.

Marcus said he was really impressed with how fast it was to launch such a complicated product that required encryption and compliance on a global scale. In the first 24 hours, the company signed up more than 1,000 businesses an hour for Here.

“The organization came together, and we built it really quickly,” he said. “I’m excited in this new capacity. If we innovate at scale, we can change the world in a meaningful way.”

Marcus joined PayPal in August 2011, after it acquired Zong, a leading mobile payments provider, where he was founder and CEO.

The appointment will be effective April 2, and Marcus will report directly to eBay’s President and CEO John Donahoe.

Since Marcus joined PayPal, he has served as the VP of mobile, responsible for leading the company’s mobile payments business. By appointing Marcus, the company is clearly emphasizing its mobile payments initiatives, which includes expanding into in-store payments at retail.

For instance, Home Depot recently rolled out PayPal to all of its nearly 2,000 stores nationwide, and PayPal is implementing its point-of-sale innovations with other national retailers this year.

In a statement, Donahoe said, “David is the right leader for PayPal. … He will bring start-up energy to PayPal’s unmatched global reach and digital payments capabilities. And he will sharpen PayPal’s focus on accelerating product innovation, driving consumer engagement and making paying anytime, anywhere through your digital wallet a safe, easy and convenient experience.”

Over the past year, Marcus worked on the development of PayPal Here, which is a card reader that can be plugged into mobile phones to accept credit card payments, much like Square, a competitor.

“Shopping is fun, but paying is not,” Marcus said in a statement. We’re off to a great start in 2012 with breakthrough products that will truly change the way everyone shops and pays.”

Most recently, Cutright was PayPal’s VP of products for North America, but started off as one of the company’s members of the core payments team that headed up localization efforts for PayPal. While at PayPal, she also led the company’s global risk management efforts for awhile.

Cutright, who will join Square next week, will have the title of VP of International.

So far, Square only operates in the U.S., by enabling small merchants to accept credit-card payments using mobile phones and tablets. It plans to roll out internationally this year, but has yet to disclose what markets it will enter in first.

Last week, PayPal launched a direct competitor to Square’s service called Here, which allows merchants to accept payments using a small dongle plugged into a smartphone — it is nearly an identical service to the one Square offers.

In the first 24 hours of availability, PayPal’s David Marcus said today in a Tweet that the company was signing up more than 1,000 businesses per hour for Here.

In a statement, a PayPal spokesperson confirmed Cutright’s departure and said the timing had nothing to do with PayPal’s recent launch of PayPal Here.

“Although Alyssa held a product role with PayPal, she was not involved in the creation or launch of PayPal Here.  PayPal Here was created by a central global product team led by David Marcus and Hill Ferguson.”

Over the past year, PayPal has lost a number of high profile executives to other companies. The most high-profile was the loss of its President Scott Thompson to Yahoo, where he now serves as CEO. Other departures have included Stephanie Tilenius and Osama Bedier to Google.

AllThingD’s Lauren Goode contributed to this report. 

The company, which is backed by North American Bancard, a privately held credit card processing company, launched its service about a year ago and is arguably less-known than others, such as Square, run by Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and backed by Visa, Intuit’s GoPayment, or PayPal.

In order to try and change that, Pay Anywhere plans to announce today a price drop to make its rates one of the lowest in the sector — by a very slim margin.

It will now charge 2.69 percent of each transaction; in other words, $2.69 for every $100 charged.

In comparison, eBay-owned PayPal, which unveiled its PayPal Here service on Friday, is charging merchants 2.7 percent of each transaction. Intuit also charges 2.7 percent; Square charges a slightly higher 2.75 percent.

Before today’s cut, Pay Anywhere was charging 2.69 percent, plus a flat rate of 19 cents per transaction, making it one of the most expensive. (A spokeswoman said the Pay Anywhere app has been downloaded more than 100,000 times since it launched. Pay Anywhere and North American Bancard does a combined $12 billion in business annually, but she declined to say how much Pay Anywhere processes alone.)

The practice of charging a flat rate and a percentage was common around a year ago, but the payment structures have changed drastically as the competition heated up. For instance, it also used to be common for providers to charge for the credit-card readers, which plug into smartphones. Those are now free, too.

But it’s unclear whether merchants will be attracted to lower interchange rates alone.

Other considerations to take into account are additional features, such as security or software. A good analytics program on the phone can track a store’s inventory; Intuit offers integration with its commonly used QuickBooks software. Square offers cash-register-like services, and PayPal says it will offer the ability to accept checks by snapping a picture of the check using a phone’s camera.

Likewise, Pay Anywhere touts many of these features, including a “built-in Heat Map” to locate sales trends.

While all of these providers are competing against traditional credit card processors and integrators that typically sell both hardware and services, they are also largely going after a different market — the massive offline business that is conducted in cash or by check.

Many merchants, from farmers to taxicab drivers, have been reluctant to pay the high rates that traditional card-processing services charge today, and only accept cash — or visibly cringe whenever a customer pulls out plastic.

The push represents an effort by frustrated merchants to get the upper hand in the fast-developing market that turns cellphones into payment devices. The race pits the retailers against banks, credit-card networks, telecommunications firms and technology companies.

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But a month later, both PayPal and its parent company eBay say they have the depth of leadership necessary to execute its plan to enter the world of in-store payments.

In an interview, David Marcus, PayPal’s VP of mobile, made the case for why its mobile payments strategy will prevail in a market surrounded by incumbents like Visa, MasterCard and American Express, as well as new entrants like Google.

On the matter of Thompson’s departure, he downplayed the role of one executive.

“The strategy wasn’t one man’s thing,” he argued. “It was a shock for 24 to 48 hours, but we control our destiny, and it’s about execution now. So far, so good.”

In addition to speaking to Marcus and several other executives, AllThingsD got an exclusive look at the company’s newly constructed “Shopping Showcase,” which will be used to demonstrate to potential partners how it envisions next-generation payments will occur at the register.

From the ground floor of the company’s San Jose headquarters, it has built several realistic-looking facades, including a hardware store, a grocery store, a clothing store and cafe; users can walk from one experience to the next. I also tried out the experience of making a real purchase at Home Depot, where it is currently being piloted at many San Jose-area stores. (See the slideshow here.)

To be sure, Thompson’s departure was abrupt. He gave PayPal only 15 hours’ notice before the planned announcement that January morning by Yahoo.

But the company now maintains that its strategy for the next two years had long since been cemented, making it much easier to absorb the blow.

Over the next few years, PayPal will be trying to take its online relationship with 106 million consumers worldwide into the physical payments world, by extending its digital wallet services to cash registers at grocery stores, hardware stores and other retail locations.

It plans to do this through a series of different technologies, including PIN codes, credit cards and other services.

Meanwhile, other providers are trying to attack the market using near field communication, where users will tap their mobile phone at the register in order to pay.

Google, Visa, MasterCard and a consortium of wireless carriers, including AT&T, Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile, are all working on similar solutions, which will require retailers and consumers to upgrade their point-of-sale technology and mobile phones, respectively.

“Yes, NFC will be useful, and we’ll be there, but today we are trying to do more than replace swiping with tapping,” Marcus said.

He envisions shopping becoming a more fluid experience. Today, you pick out the items you want, place them in your shopping cart and then stand in line at the checkout.

But in the future, he asks, why couldn’t that change? What if you paid for items in the store’s aisles, or purchased them online before picking them up in the store?

NFC can be restrictive, because you have to be at a physical location in order to tap a terminal and pay.

The scenarios are possible, given how fast things are already changing.

Last year, PayPal exceeded its own expectations, reaching $4 billion in mobile payment volume. This year, it expects to increase that to $7 billion. One of those purchases last year was a $40,000 backhoe, which someone bought using PayPal on their phone.

“By the time NFC catches up, we will be in a world that will move away from the point-of-sales terminal,” he predicts.

As with PayPal’s traditional business, it expects to make money on fees, also called the interchange rate, which the retailer is responsible for paying. Its goal is not to provide a cheaper solution than the incumbents. Rather, it wants to provide other perks that will help retailers and provide incentive for the retailers to want to work with PayPal.

Such perks could include platforms that will allow the retailers to offer loyalty programs, shopping lists, credit options or coupons.

“If you add a payment method that adds 30 to 40 percent more volume [in business to the retailer], then the interchange doesn’t matter,” Marcus said.

Completed two weeks ago, the showcase is designed to woo major retailers and other potential partners that may be considering adopting PayPal’s mobile payments services.

The room includes several realistic-looking facades, including a hardware store, a cafe, a grocery store and a clothing retailer.

In each scenario, it demonstrates how it uses a mix of new technologies, offers and loyalty programs to make it faster and easier to and pay and stay engaged with the retailer.

What you won’t see is demonstrations of near field communications, which is a technology being used by many of its competitors. (To learn why it is not using NFC, read an interview with PayPal’s VP of Mobile David Marcus, coming later today.)

I also visited Home Depot in San Jose to buy something using my PayPal account. The service is now live at many of the Bay Area hardware stores.

Today, PayPal is one of the leading online payments companies, with 106 million users worldwide; but this year, the eBay-owned company is attempting to move offline, by partnering with retailers like Home Depot and other major chains to be announced later this year.

Here are the photos from the Shopping Shopping Showcase and Home Depot shopping visits:

View the slideshow