A Red Herring story talks about a 24% increase in earnings for eBay this year compared to same period last year. The article has some interesting subscriber numbers for the group's three pillar businesses: marketplaces, communications, and payments:
- eBay's user base jumped to 192 million from 147 million a year ago (this does not include the other smaller marketplaces owned by the company)
- Skype has 94.6 registered users
- And finally PayPal's registered users crossed the 100 million milestone to reach 105 million from 71.6 million same time last year.
In other news bloggers are reporting that Yahoo! yesterday was awarded a patent that seems awfully similar to PayPal. The invention covers "Systems and methods for implementing person-to-person money exchange".
People are speculating that this might herald a new entrant (or re-entrant) to the online payments field. But the patent was filed 6 years ago in August 2000 and therefore I tend to think that it tells us little about the company's current plans and more about their strategy back then.
Also the fact that it took 6 years to get the patent either points to an inefficiency on the part of the USPTO, the agency responsible for awarding intellectual property rights, or an overambition on the part of the patent filers. In the latter case Yahoo lawyers/engineers would have started out with a filing that covered too much and then had to take their filing documents back and forth removing or rewording some claims until the patent agent finally agreed that Yahoo's described peer to peer payment system is actually novel, useful, and nontrivial.
