PayPal was founded in December 1998 by Peter Thiel and Max Levchin. One of its first premises was the 165 University Avenue office in Palo Alto, California, home of a number of other noted Silicon Valley startups. On the business side, many of its initial recruits were alumni of The Stanford Review, which was also founded by Peter Thiel. Most of the early engineers hailed from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, recruited by Max Levchin. In its initial incarnation, PayPal was a service for users to send money via PDAs, with actor James Doohan, Star Trek's "Scotty," as its spokesman. The PDA software was later discarded in favor of a web-based system that became popular with eBay's millions of buyers and sellers. Coupled with aggressive marketing campaigns offering $10 (and later $5) for new users to sign up, the firm grew at a meteoric rate of 7–10 percent per day between January and March 2000.
Mother's Day is a day honoring mothers, celebrated on various days in many places around the world. It complements Father's Day, the celebration honoring fathers.
It is a relatively modern concept, not to be confused with the 16th century celebration of Mothering Sunday.
While beginning in the United States the late 2000s recession spread to Europe rapidly and has affected much of the region which several countries already in recession as of February 2009, and most others suffering marked economic set backs.
