A few days ago, Tricia Duryee wrote a story at paidContent about how PayPal had some plans to feature its mobile abilities going forward. The post’s first commenter went directly at what I’d planned to say, mostly, after I’d read this post in NetNewsWire, but I thought it worthwhile to point out anyway.
You see, I’ve always been a sucker for technology and keeping an eye on what’s new, and trying to find what’s next. At that time, PayPal had one of the cooler features in that you could beam – yeah, not via email – “money” back and forth to others using handheld devices, such as Palm ones. Of course, I had to be different and had a Handspring Visor (Ice, natch), and found this service especially useful when four or five of us would go to lunch together, and rather than drive our waiter or waitress crazy, one person would pay, and the rest of us would beam our portion of the meal to the other. After syncing our devices back up with PayPal, voila, money transferred.
Sure, you can do similar things today and PayPal has a perfectly fine iPhone application, but the ability to transfer funds so instantaneously was super smart, and super useful. I’m honestly surprised that this ability hasn’t really come back en vogue, especially after about a decade of its usefulness being around.