There’s been a few stories about PayPal’s incipient move into mobile payments, although they’re all based on the fact that the company is hiring for that purpose which we reported on back in February. A big question is why PayPal is only now getting into mobile payments — I thought it would have been the first, especially since the company originally intended to do m-payments, according to this story.
The story also makes another interesting point: “PayPal’s biggest opportunity for mobile payments may lie abroad. While its e-mail payments work well in markets where PC penetration is high, it’s not as useful in developing countries, where computers are not yet widely adopted. In India and China, for example, cell-phone usage far exceeds computer usage.”
This is a good point…in a lot of countries most people who access digital content do so through mobile phones, so digital payments should follow the same route. There’s already a fully-fledged mobile bank in South Africa…
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