Paypal is a major player in the eCommerce world. In 2008, Paypal transactions represents 9% of global e-commerce, and 15% of U.S. ecommerce. As of 2nd quarter of 2009, there were about $3 billion dollars stored in PayPal's 193 million accounts worldwide. 75 million of those accounts are active with activity within last 12 months. Over two thousand dollars are transacted by PayPal every second.

PayPal supports about 23 different currencies including the obvious ones such as US dollars, Euros, Canadian dollars, Austrian dollars, British Pounds. But it also supports the Yen, Pesos, Kroner, Hungarian Forints, Israeli Shekels, Polish Zloty, Francs and more (see full list). That means that buyers and sellers can be on different sides of the globe in countries of different currencies and PayPal will perform the transaction taking into account the currency conversion rate.

It all started in December 1998 when Max Levchin and Peter Thiel founded the company named Confinity (derived from the word confidence and infinity).

In October 1999, a Confinity engineer demos a prototype of payment via email.

Company was renamed to "PayPal" in 2001.

In February 2002, PayPal went IPO with its stock rising 54.5% on February 15 on its first day as a public company.

Shortly later that year in 2002, PayPal was acquired by eBay for $1.5 million.

In February 2006, Paypal surpassed the 100 million accounts mark.

PayPal is head-quartered in San Jose (at the heart of California's silicon valley)

Many people know PayPal as the transaction vehicle for making payments online and for paying for goods bought on eBay (which owns PayPal).  However, Paypal offers many other products for merchants and developers to integrate into their web application to perform payment transactions.  These includes PayPal Website Payment Standard, PayPal Website Payment Pro, Paypal Express Checkout, Payflow.  Some these products (such as PayPal Website Payment Standard) are PayPal branded so that the consumer sees the PayPal brand.  And other products (such as Website Payment Pro) can be completely hidden behind the scenes of an web application where the consumer has no idea that PayPal is the underlying payment processor.

Paypal's latest product is "Adaptive Payments". Unlike their product "Website Payment Standard" and "Website Payment Pro" where there is one sender of money to one recipient of money, their new product "Adaptive Payments" has the features of "split-payment" and "chained payments" where one recipient can send money and that money can go to multiple recipients. 

Product such as these are mainly used by developers for building web applications that requires innovative payment solutions.  That is why PayPal is so focused on gaining the attention of developers.

In November 2009, PayPal hosted its first developer conference for for PayPal developers called "Innovate09 - The Intersection of Ideas & Money".

This two-day conference is where PayPal introduced the release of their new product "Adaptive Payments" and the launch of their new website X.com for PayPal developers.

Much talked about in regards to this conference was PayPal's surprise gift to all pre-registered attendees of the conference. The surprise gift was an ASUS EEE PC netbook worth about $300. Most other conferences you can expect free pens and tee-shirt. But a free netbook is quite unexpected. Of course, PayPal gets something in return. By giving out free netbooks to an audience of highly-wired and socially-networked developers, they get free publicity as developers blog and tweet about this conference. And as no surprise, there were rows of reserved seats specifically for bloggers and a press room at he conference.

PayPal has the philosophy of opening up the PayPal infrastructure to developer access via "APIs", or "Application Programming Interfaces". With these APIs developers can build web application that harness the functionality of PayPal's payment processor engine.

As another benefit to developers, Paypal offers a directory of such "PayPal Certified Developers" who has passed a Paypal examination of their skills and knowledge of the use of these PayPal APIs.