Some of the stuff on show was fabulous: the stuff on augmented reality (with Layar), the digital TV commerce button, the digital goods purchasing. I enjoyed looking round what the developers were doing and I even wandered into the hackathon to see if I could understand what they were doing. What they were doing was writing code to create new applications there and then. And they did.
Over 300 people hacked for 15 hours and we’re pleased to announce the winners of our Hackalicious Hackathon! Congratulations to PayTEL, Affiliation APP, Tweet Engine for PayPal Docs and Buddy Beers social gift-giving for creating the most innovative demonstrations of how to “change the way people pay” using PayPal X’s tools, services and products
[From PayPal X Developer Network: Naveed Anwar's Blog: Winners of Second PayPal X Developer Challenge and Hackathon Revealed! Innovate 2010 Comes to a Close.]
It's funny though, but I thought that one of the most significant announcement was one of the dullest. While the stuff about television buy buttons and digital goods purchases and super-cool augmented reality will grab most people's attention, I thought that it was the announcement of PayPal Business Payments that seemed to me to be something that will mean real industry change. By coincidence, I happened to be chatting in the break to a developer who works on real-estate management software and he surprised my by saying that he works on commercial projects (for shopping malls and so forth) where the tenants want to use PayPal to pay bills. This, and a couple of other conversations I was involved in, leads mean to think that Russ Jones from Glenbrook is surely right to say that
We expect PayPal Business Payments to find a good reception in B2B payments, rent payments, healthcare payments, and other similar commercial markets. Learn more about PayPal X for business payment
[From PayPal X Innovate 2010 – Day 1 — Payments Views from Glenbrook Partners]
This is why I ended up spending more time looking at what the folks from Freshbooks and Bill.com were doing, because it seems to me that these kinds of solutions will be transformational: they will make a big difference to small businesses, which are most businesses. Freshbooks provides an outsourced invoicing service for small businesses, so that if you are (say) a small architect practice or law firm then you sign up and they generate invoices for you and automate collections. Bill.com works on the other end of the problem, which is to take your bills and automate their payment: when you get a paper bill you scan it in or fax it to them, and they turn it into an electronic item that you can process online (and pay using PayPal, naturally). If you think about the processes in a typical small business, the automation of the payment by itself just does not mean a massive cost saving: you have to get rid of the paper documents that go with it too.
We might summarise the sector as "e-invoicing" and, believe me, no matter how dull that sounds, the companies that crack it are going to make a lot of money.
