PayPal announces its second $150K developer challenge

PayPal continues its efforts to woo developers to build innovative payment applications on top of its technology. It just announced its second PayPal X Developer Challenge, which will again give out up to $150,000 in prizes.

The company (owned by eBay) has been evangelizing to developers for the past year, hoping that the creation of cool payment tools will help make PayPal the “electricity” for all e-commerce (as company PayPal executives have put it). Following the launch of its developer platform last July, PayPal held its first developer conference and announced the developer challenge.

That contest received hundreds of applicants, and the winners were Rentalic, a marketplace where people can rent out anything they own, and Appbackr, where developers can sell their iPhone apps to wholesale buyers. Those winners were announced this spring at the DEMO conference co-produced at VentureBeat, where PayPal said that it is creating an accelerator program for startups.

This year, like last year, the winner of the grand prize will receive a $50,000 payment and up to $50,000 in waived PayPal fees. There will be a People’s Choice winner chosen by visitors to the x.com website, and an Audience Award winner chosen by attendees of the PayPal X Innovate conference in October. PayPal has also added a number of smaller X Awards worth up to $10,000 each in the following categories:

• Best application built from the PayPal X Mobile Payments Library
• Best application built by university students
• Best consumer application
• Best application for cross-border commerce
• Best application built on the Yahoo platform (provided by the Yahoo Developer Network)
• Best application built on the eBay platform (provided by eBay).

Contest details, including deadlines, are available at x.com.

[image: Flickr/Ben Franklin]