ReadWriteWeb

Canadian company ConnectionPoint is about to unveil its FundRazr Facebook application as the only service utilizing both PayPal X's Adaptive Account API and its Adaptive Payment API. Initially launched in private beta at TC50, Fundrazr allows users to collect fees and donations through Facebook.

After waiting for two months for PayPal to release its much-anticipated platform, the day has finally arrived for PayPal X. ReadWriteWeb first covered the company's announcement in late July and today, at San Francisco's Concourse Exhibition Center, developers and press people waited with bated breath to see what was earlier described as a "platform as ubiquitous as the electrical outlet."

This morning on the Google Checkout Blog, the company announced the introduction of a new, embeddable gadget which you can place on any web site where you sell your products and/or services. An embeddable gadget like this is nothing new to the online shopping space - Checkout's major competitor PayPal has offered their own copy-and-paste code for years on end. But what's interesting about this new gadget is how it's tied to the Google Docs service for inventory management on the back-end. The gadget is also incredibly simple to set up and use.

PayPal announced what it calls the first global payment platform open to outside developers today. The company said it believes the move will make PayPal a bigger business than eBay and help foster a future where online payment capabilities are like electrical outlets - ubiquitous, enabling, financially and technologically fecund. It's an incredibly ambitious vision, but a logical one.

The new Application Programming Interface (API) is due to become available in early November. It will let software developers plug PayPal payment functionality into their systems to leverage the company's transaction, currency and security capabilities. Most interesting to us was the electric outlet analogy.

The Internet economy has been built on the network effect (i.e. the effect that one user of a good or service has on the value of that product for other people). Investors and entrepreneurs have treated this like Moore's Law. But just as Moore's Law hits physical constraints, network effects have a limit in many types of online communities. Indeed, in some cases, a reverse network effect may exist: as new people join, others are motivated to leave. This dramatically affects the length of the competitive advantage enjoyed by these ventures. In this post, we'll look at which ventures suffer from reverse network effects, which don't, and which may suffer depending on the strategy they choose to adopt.

At the Accel Symposium, we heard John Donahoe, eBay CEO, admit that there was little synergy between core eBay, PayPal, and Skype. He lauded PayPal, showed some false modesty around Skype, and talked about core eBay in a way that indicated a clear understanding of its limitations and challenges. If that sounds a tad negative, that was not what I took away. What I did take away was that eBay is a great collection of parts, a really great collection of parts, that would be more valuable as independent entities.

This morning, the OpenID Foundation announced that PayPal has joined the OpenID Foundation Board, becoming the first financial institution to join the Foundation as a sustaining member. Andrew Nash, Sr. Director of Information Risk Management, has been named as the PayPal representative on the Board. PayPal's commitment to the cause is another vote of confidence for OpenID, especially considering PayPal's role dealing with sensitive financial data.

Online magazine Salon.com today opened up its new hosted blog network, Open Salon, which not only allows its readers (or anybody else for that matter) to create their own blogs, but also has a built-in tipping mechanism to reward writers for their best content. As a blog host, Open Salon's feature set is similar to that of Wordpress.com or Blogger, but the differentiating feature for Open Salon is clearly the 'Tippem' tip jar which is prominently featured on every page.

In April, eBay filed a notification with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) seeking permission to circumvent section 47 of the Australian Trade Practices Act of 1974, which disallows businesses from creating exclusive deals that have the purpose or effect of lessening competition, in order to more fully integrate PayPal into its operations. As the ACCC put its, "Generally speaking, [the Act prohibits] exclusive dealing involves one business trading with another person, imposing restrictions on their freedom to choose with whom, or in what, it deals." Today, the ACCC released a draft notice denying eBay's request.

In an interview with Macworld, PayPal issues a dire warning to users of Apple's Safari browser: don't use it if you want to avoid online fraud. Apparently, Safari is not on PayPal's list of recommended browsers due to its lack of support for some of the anti-phishing features the other browsers have. Instead, PayPal is recommending the use of IE, Firefox, or Opera, because they are safer for the average user.