In preparation for our upcoming report, I re-read our first report on P2P payments published almost 10 years ago to the day (29 Nov 1999). Although written early in the game, I was very impressed with PayPal, a service launched two weeks earlier (15 Nov 1999) by Confinity, the original name of its parent company.

We’ve made our share of incorrect predictions over the years, but this one we got right (note 1), annointing PayPal with one of the first OBR Best of the Web awards. Here’s our take from that original report, when PayPal was available as a payment option on just nine eBay auctions:

(PayPal) is not as well known as BidPay….but as soon as (eBay) participants discover (PayPal) is free and real-time, it should catch on quickly.

PayPal was originally developed as a payment mechanism between Palm Pilots, which explains the “beam money” call-to-action on top of the original user interface (below). But I wasn’t a Palm user, so what got me excited about the service was the use of the email address to facilitate payments:

Much of (PayPal’s) press coverage has focused on the Palm application…(but) it’s the email-payment program that has the huge potential.

The rest, as they say, is history.

PayPal “send money” interface at its 1999 launch (15 Nov 1999)

PayPal “send money” today (19 Nov 2009)

Note:
1. And truth be told, we predicted  that PayPal would need to hook up with an existing payment player to get past trust issues. But luckily for them, the extremely deep-pocketed VCs in the bubble days floated PayPal a massive amount of cash so it could buy its way into the wallets of consumers.