PayPal opens up to developers

PayPal announced a new version of its Developer Central portal at the eBay Developers Conference in Chicago earlier this week.  Understandably, PayPal wants to lower the barrier to integrating its online payment services to websites not already using its services. The portal offers 25 application programming interfaces (API) created to perform various payment-related transactions. It also will list a directory of PayPal-certified developers.

The PayPal Developer program, which was launched in 2001, has 300 certified developers out of 35,000 registered members.  According to PayPal, there are 60 million active accounts spread over 190 markets at the moment--a staggering figure regardless of how you look at it.

For more on PayPal's new portal:
- check out this InformationWeek article