PayPal has made available slides from 24 of the presentations at last week's PayPal Developers' Conference event.

Over on our PaymentsViews.com sister blog, Glenbrook's Russ Jones shares his perspective on what he found to be the most interesting item to come of our PayPal's Developer Conference earlier this week: PayPal Adaptive Accounts.

PayPal announced the PayPal X Developer Challenge by asking developers "to solve the fundamental problems people face when trying to pay or get paid." PayPal is offering prizes totaling $75,000 in cash and $75,000 in waived fees to winners in the Challenge. Contestants must build their applications using the PayPal X application programming interfaces (APIs). The challenge: create the most innovative payment application for businesses in areas such as services, social media, gaming, mobile and consumer electronics. READ MORE

FIS has announced that it is integrating PayPal's person-to-person (P2P) payment system into the FIS online bill payment application for financial institutions. FIS says that "by integrating paperless P2P functionality into its online bill payment application, FIS empowers banks and credit unions to simultaneously solve for a real consumer need and drive increased transaction activity at the online channel." READ MORE

At its first ever Developers Conference held in San Francisco today, PayPal opened its global payments platform, PayPal X including new application programming interfaces (APIs), a new developer portal and introductory services pricing to help developers reap the financial benefits of building businesses on PayPal X. PayPal also demonstrated a mobile payment toolkit to embed payments directly into mobile applications – starting with iPhone. READ MORE

PayPal's parent eBay announced financial results for the third quarter 2009 today. PayPal's revenue grew 15% year over year to $688 MM. PayPal's purchase volume grew 19% to $17.7 billion. Active registered accounts reached 78 MM, up 19% year over year. PayPal's revenue ("transaction revenue rate") was 3.67% with transaction processing expense rate at 1.16% and a transaction loss rate of 0.25%.

A presentation on the results is available online. Bill Me Later's volume for the quarter was $200 MM, essentially flat with the prior quarter. BML's outstanding portfolio balance was $561 MM. Net chargeoffs in the BML portfolio were 11.5%, up from 11.1% in the prior quarter.

A transcript of today's eBay conference call is available from SeekingAlpha.com.

PayPal has announced that a panel of leading venture capitalists will discuss "breakthrough opportunities in payments" available to entrepreneurs at the upcoming PayPal X Innovate 2009 developer conference in San Francisco on Nov. 3-4.

Moderated by GigaOm blogger Om Malik, the panel will include Brian Ascher from Venrock, Roger Lee from Battery Ventures, Eric O'Brien from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Dana Stalder from Matrix Partners. READ MORE

First Data has announced an agreement with PayPal that allows debit cardholders in First Data’s STAR Network to quickly link their STAR debit card to a PayPal account online. First Data says its STAR Network is "the first electronic funds transfer network to offer this innovative service to its member financial institutions." READ MORE

Green Dot and PayPal have announced an agreement that will allow U.S. consumers to load money directly to their PayPal accounts using Green Dot’s MoneyPak. This will enable people to shop anywhere PayPal is accepted without the need for a bank account or credit card. READ MORE

If you're in the San Francisco Bay Area on the evening of Tuesday, October 20th, you may want to attend the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab discussion on the topic of "Mobile Wallet: Can your phone replace your wallet?" being held at Stanford University.

Panelists for the discussion, to be moderated by Scott Ellison - Vice President/Mobile and Wireless, IDC, include:

• Wenceslao Casares - Founder, Co-Chief Executive Officer and Director, BlingNation
• Eric Duprat - General Manager Mobile, Paypal
• Dev Khare - Vice President, Venrock
• Margaret Mackenzie - SVP Operations and Chief Financial Officer, Boku
• Carol Realini - CEO, Obopay

More details here.

Mary Pilon reports for the Wall St. Journal on PayPal's new Student Account program - saying it is "stepping further into the world of mainstream banking." Included is a link to an interview by MarketWatch’s Jonathan Burton with PayPal vice president Don Fotsch who helped lead development of the new program.

PayPal has announced the launch of the Student Account - calling it "a fast and secure way for U.S. teens to shop online using PayPal and in stores with the Student Card, while providing parents with a variety of monitoring capabilities."

According to PayPal, "the Student Account eliminates the hassle of everyday money exchange between parents and teens, while giving teens the chance to learn good spending habits through the experience of being responsible for their own money. Parents can establish up to four PayPal sub-accounts for their teens, transferring funds into those accounts when needed, on a one-time or recurring basis." READ MORE

Geoffrey Fowler reports for the Wall St. Journal on yesterday's global service outage suffered by PayPal. All PayPal users were affected for about an hour mid-day yesterday. A PayPal spokesman attributed the outage to an "internal network hardware issue".

PayPal's Scott Guilfoyle addressed the outage in a post to the PayPal Blog.

Over on our sister blog, PaymentsViews.com, Glenbrook's Russ Jones reviews what he learned at yesterday's announcement of PayPal's Adaptive Payments platform.

Russ writes: "First, there is a lot going on here. But what’s most interesting to me is what some at PayPal call “split payments”. ... It’s an important concept and well worth understanding."

PayPal has announced plans "to open its payment platform to third-party developers with the release of new APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) that allow developers to embed PayPal’s secure global payment system into their applications and platforms. In opening up the PayPal platform, developers can now create new ways to send and receive payments for services beyond traditional e-commerce. According to a recent McKinsey report, the global payments market represents a $30 trillion opportunity." READ MORE

In an article titled "EBay Plans to Ride PayPal Business to Greater Profit", Claire Cain Miller writes for the New York Times about eBay's plans to open up the PayPal platform to developers "who want to build applications that use PayPal’s technology." PayPal is scheduled to unveil its platform plans later today.

PayPal's parent eBay announced financial results for the second quarter 2009 today. PayPal's revenue grew 11% year over year to $669 million. PayPal's purchase volume grew 12% to $16.7 billion. Active registered accounts reached 75.4 million, up 20% year over year. PayPal's revenue ("transaction revenue rate") was 3.77% with transaction processing expense rate at 1.15% and a transaction loss rate of 0.30%.

A presentation on the results is available online. In the presentation, PayPal's segment margin is reported as 16.1% for the quarter, down from 19.5% in the same quarter last year. Bill Me Later's volume was $200 million for the quarter with an outstanding portfolio balance of $553 million. Net chargeoffs in the BML portfolio were 11.1%, up from 8.95% in the prior quarter.

Following the TechCrunch story earlier today about PayPal's Application Platform, Osama Bedier, VP of platform and emerging technology at PayPal, has posted an article on the PayPal Blog saying: "...it is true that PayPal will be the first and only global payments platform open to third-party developers allowing them to easily monetize their ideas."

The PayPal Blog notes that JP Morgan has recently published an "in-depth analysis on the PayPal business".

PayPal has released a new survey released finding that nearly half (45 percent) of online shoppers have abandoned their carts multiple times in the past three weeks due to high shipping costs, security concerns and lack of convenience. According to PayPal's survey, the average cost of abandoned goods in U.S. shopping carts is $109. READ MORE

On the New York Times Bits blog, Saul Hansell writes about PayPal's fraud risk management techniques - noting that "you may not have ever bought anything with PayPal, but it’s got a file on you anyway, just in case."

In an article titled "Investors Bet on Payments via Cellphone", Claire Cain Miller and Matt Richtel write for the New York Times about Obopay (and MasterCard's MoneySend launched last week with Obopay), Boku, Zong and PayPal.

[Editor's note: one facet of a couple of these services that the article's authors fail to note is the cost of payment acceptance - and how that cost varies from service to service. In some segments - such as virtual goods where merchants have a close to zero cost of goods sold - merchants can afford to pay a lot to gain widespread acceptance on cell phones. Other merchants, with real costs of goods sold, would find the costs of these approaches out of the question. There's a similar story when it comes to person-to-person money transfer. For domestic transfers in the US, there's a certain cost sensitivity. For international remittances involving currency conversion, on the other hand, there's a much greater opportunity to price for value. Need help understanding all of this? Drop us a note here!]

PayPal CEO Scott Thompson was interviewed at Wired's first Business Conference - “Disruptive by Design” - held in New York earlier this week. In the interview, Scott talks about the history of PayPal, how the company innovated to integrate with national payment systems in many countries around the world, and the innovations in risk management that have been fundamental to PayPal's success.

Read Scott's blog post about the interview - and you can watch the full video of the interview here. Highly recommended!

PayPal has announced that, effective today, "you can send money via PayPal to friends and family in the US for free" - as long as the payment is funded from your bank checking account or your PayPal account balance. You can also pay using a credit card and, if so, "you can choose to pay the fee or have the recipient pay it."

BusinessWeek's Douglas MacMillan writes about meeting with PayPal president Scott Thompson recently where he dispelled rumors that PayPal might follow its sister business unit Skype and be spun out of eBay. Thompson noted that the acquisition last fall of Bill Me Later was easier to accomplish with the strength of eBay's balance sheet.

Over on The PayPal Blog, Bill Clark, an analyst in the risk team at PayPal, writes about why PayPal has rolling seller reserves in place. He notes that "PayPal may require that a small percentage of some of our sellers’ payment volume be held in their account for a period of time, sort of like a security deposit to cover future chargebacks and reversals."

PayPal Australia has announced "a new programme to help more organisations get online and take advantage of the Internet to open up new revenue streams. With e-commerce expected to continue to grow in the coming years, PayPal will launch a ‘Certified Developer and Partner Program’ to recruit developers and solution providers to help meet the growing demand for online payments outside of the retail sector. In addition, the company has made new tools and resources available to help organisations such as charities, foundations, schools and universities start accepting online payments and donations easily." READ MORE

Saul Hansell of the New York Times has a post on the BITS blog titled "Undoing Meg Whitman’s eBay" in which he looks at the recent actions by eBay CEO John Donahue undoing several of the acquisitions done by former eBay CEO Meg Whitman. Hansell writes that Donahue is, however, excited about PayPal - but asks what PayPal is trying to be - and questions whether it adds value.

PayPal's parent eBay announced financial results for the first quarter 2009 today. PayPal's revenue grew 11% year over year to $645 million. PayPal's purchase volume grew 18% on an foreign exchange-neutral basis to $15.9 billion. PayPal reported 73.1 active accounts, up 22%. PayPal's revenue ("global take rate") came in at 3.81% of payment volume with transaction expense rate at 1.16% and a transaction loss rate of 0.28%

PayPal and The Royal Bank of Scotland have won the ‘Best New Prepaid Card Product of the Year’ at Card Awards 2009 for their PayPal Top Up product, which is processed by global payments services provider, TSYS. READ MORE