At the PayPal X Developer Conference keynote today, PayPal revealed a new partnership which could fundamentally change mobile commerce. PayPal -- arguably the most recognized name in online finance -- is teaming up with Appcelerator -- the second largest Apple App Store publisher -- to offer mobile developers a new e-commerce platform.
The eight million plus PayPal merchants will soon have Appcelerator Titanium+Commerce available to develop an integrated mobile commerce platform. The beta release of the development platform is available as of today, with the official release expected in early 2011. With Titanium+Commerce, developers can easily build cross-platform mobile apps that provide comprehensive commerce capabilities.
"Appcelerator is already the number two Apple App Store publisher because they enable rapid mobile innovation," said Osama Bedier, PayPal's vice president of platform, mobile and new ventures. "I'm excited to be working with them to bring that innovation potential to mobile commerce, which I believe will one day be bigger than e-commerce."
According to a press release about the new partnership from Appcelerator, "Titanium+Commerce will initially consist of an integration of PayPal's Mobile Payment Library on top of Appcelerator's Titanium development platform. Both companies are also working to expand their capabilities to include a broader range of integrated commerce capabilities, including, and transaction analytics and other joint integrations."
Merchants and online businesses can rapidly extend into mobile commerce by enabling the purchase of real and virtual goods, services, and content from smartphones, tablets, connected TVs, and other devices.
Appcelerator's traction with developers, agencies, and businesses continues to grow at a rapid pace. Over 77,000 developers have used Appcelerator's Titanium platform to build 5,000 mobile and desktop apps, up from just 100 at the start of this year. The current pace exceeds 1,000 new applications per month and the company is now the second largest publisher of applications on Apple's App Store.
"The strong support we are seeing from our venture investors and eBay, together with Appcelerator's rapid growth clip, underscores the market need for sophisticated, yet easy-to-build applications that run on any platform," said Jeff Haynie, CEO of Appcelerator. "Appcelerator will continue to expand our platform offering across the major operating systems and devices and to enable developers to easily integrate value-add commerce, location, social, advertising, and enterprise capabilities into their applications."
I spoke with Appcelerator VP of Marketing Scott Schwarzhoff about the new PayPal relationship and the Titanium+Commerce platform, and was able to take a sneak peek at what the platform has to offer. Appcelerator has a powerful tool wrapped in a slick interface.
I am not an app developer, but the demonstration I viewed of the capabilities of Titanium+Commerce make it look quite simple to take advantage of the commerce features of PayPal on mobile platforms.