E-gold Offered Mobile Payments 7 Years Before PayPal

We heard way back in March 2006 from Ina Steiner of AuctionBytes.com (who seems to be a physic) that PayPal was launching a new Mobile-Payment Service. The user-to-user application allows PayPal users to send a payment to another person via text-messaging. The sender must know the recipient’s mobile phone number or email address.

Send money to friends and family

Send money securely, anytime, from wherever you are. You don’t need cash or a check – just your phone.

After you activate your phone, you can send money one of two ways:

Text to 729725 (PAYPAL) with the amount and recipient’s phone number.

Example: send 5 to 4150001234 or Call 1-800-4PAYPAL (1-800-472-9725) and follow the instructions.

Users must first activate the mobile telephone by logging into their PayPal account at https://www.paypal.com/mobile. They register your mobile phone number, you choose a PIN etc. It is not that sophisticated or complicated however the convenient option is proving to be very secure and useful for many of their new mobile payment users.

In the past 6 months it has become quite a big deal and another huge draw to use PayPal over anything else. You can read all about it and sign up here: https://www.paypal.com/mobile . Again, PayPal is providing a much needed service transferring funds via mobile devices.

View demo

Let us now flash back 7 years to the end of 1999. We won’t let Michael J. Fox drive the time machine this trip, but consider you have now arrived in December 1999. The Whois IP records indicate that the domain PayPal.com was just created that July. However, in July there was no ‘big money company’ behind the domain.

If you were reading the paper during that time you may have also seen the blurb about a small CA company by the name of “Confinity” (the official name of the company that gave us PayPal) which had just merged with another company called X.com.

Note: Later that year, X.com’s CEO Elon Musk, who was so passionate about the the name “X.com”, wanted to change the name to “X-PayPal” (the funniest thing was - that a survey of women complained that the name seemed pornographic!!) Shortly after that survey the final name “PayPal” was adopted and remember this was still late in 1999. Additionally, at that time in PayPal’s infancy Russian computer Mafiosos, were hacking the X.com/PayPal accounts on a regular basis, creating large fraud losses.

So what is the point of my story here? Am I explaining the painful details of the 1999 PayPal creation? NO…….if you read further in your 1999 paper you may have noticed this press blub (the actual one from their web) on e-gold.com entitled:

Wireless Phone Access To e-gold Now Available December 1999

Pay off your dinner tab right in the restaurant? Check your e-gold account balance on the city bus? You can do it now. e-gold now provides wireless access via its pcs.e-gold.com site. Use your SprintPCS Wireless Web phone, AT&T PocketNet Premium phone or other compatible HDML/WAP to access

http://mobile.e-gold.com

European and other WAP compatible users should access:

http://mobile.e-gold.com/wml

Not only in the US but also Europe while PayPal was still being formed, e-gold was already delivering wireless access to their client’s digital currency accounts. Transfer funds, make payments, check balances….anytime and that was like 7 years before any SMS PayPal announcement.

You can check out a quick e-gold demo here:

http://pcs.e-gold.com/demo.html

I’m not a technical guy, but I do know a little bit about this topic because over a year ago I created a ‘prepaid e-gold plastic card’ just like a prepaid phone card. You buy it, scratch off the back panels showing the numbers and INSTANTLY load your e-gold account from anywhere using your cell phone, blackberry, laptop, PC etc. (www.au-gold.net)

The e-gold technology is not only awesome, it is ages ahead of most other products. I urge you to open an account and try it out.

Just a little more irony:

The original vision of PayPal from Peter Thiel, a hedge fund manager & Max Levchin, an engineer from the Ukraine was to create a system that would permit people around the world not only to be able to pay each other via the Internet, but also to be able to protect themselves when their governments were inflating their currencies. (How ironic since the accounts are pegged to local currencies and mostly invested in US Money Market funds not precious metals like e-gold which are 100% inflation proof.)

Mark Herpel

mgmt@gold-companies.com