Paypal Looks to Crush Amazon’s Fledgling Payment Service With A New, Secret API

It looks like PayPal is rolling out a more flexible payments API called Adaptive Payments. We've obtained a confidential document, which is embedded below, explaining the details of the new system. Basically the API is designed to give developers full access to PayPal’s features, allowing them a lot more freedom in building applications which include the ability to accept and distribute payments. Very similar to Amazon's Flexible Payments Service (FPS), the Adaptive Payments API handles payments between a sender of a payment and one or more receivers of the payment. Adaptive Payments allows almost the same functionality as FPS. The new API lets developers become a payment aggregator, which we are told is something against PayPal’s current Terms of Service. Amazon's FPS also lets developers aggregate payments. Moreover, Paypal's Adaptive Payments has built in micropayments support, another feature of FPS.

The TechCrunch Europas Awards: The Nominees Are…

The Europas, the TechCrunch Europe Awards 2009 for European and EMEA tech companies, will be held on July 9 in London and with over 300 people coming from across Europe's startup scene, it should be pretty fun. Over 400 entrants were voted on by the industry - we had over 50,000 votes in aggregate - and these results were merged with those from 19 expert advisors. Thanks to our sponsors for supporting these inaugural awards. The shortlisted nominees in each category are...