At its PayPal X Innovate 2009 developer conference, PayPal issued a challenge to developers to solve the fundamental problems people face when trying to pay or get paid.At its PayPal X Innovate 2009 developer conference, PayPal issued a
challenge to developers to solve the fundamental problems people face
when trying to pay or get paid.
PayPal announced the PayPal X Developer Challenge on Nov. 4. With
prizes totaling $75,000 in cash and $75,000 in waived fees, the PayPal
X Developer Challenge offers anyone with an idea the opportunity and
seed capital to create a new business based on the PayPal open payments
platform, PayPal X.
Contestants must build their applications using the PayPal X
application programming interfaces (APIs). PayPal officials said
the challenge is to create the most innovative payment application for
businesses in areas such as services, social media, gaming, mobile and
consumer electronics.
"PayPal is putting developers in the driver's seat to enable new and
emerging business models for their innovations," said Osama Bedier,
PayPal's vice president of platform and emerging technology, in a
statement. "We're challenging developers to take PayPal X for a spin.
And while the prize money is certainly an incentive, the real reward
will be making payments easy, for the very first time, for an entirely
new generation of applications built by our developer community."
The first and second prizes are $50,000 and $25,000 in cash,
respectively, and $50,000 and $25,000 in waived PayPal transaction
fees. To enter the PayPal X Developer Challenge, log on to www.x.com,
read the contest rules, and start coding. The deadline for final
submissions is Feb. 1, 2010. The winners will be announced in March.
Entries must include a link to a demo application and an accompanying
video describing how it would work.
Finalists will be determined by popular vote on x.com and a panel of
judges including eBay founder Pierre Omidyar; PayPal president Scott
Thompson; general partner of Andreessen/Horowitz, Marc Andreessen; and
Sequoia Capital's Roelof Botha, who will choose the top two prize
winners.