eBay

Developer(s) Skype Limited
Initial release August 2003 (2003-08)
Stable release 5.3.0.111 (Windows)
5.1.0.922 (Mac OS X)
2.2.0.25 (Linux) (April 20, 2011; 4 days ago (2011-04-20) (Windows)
April 14, 2011; 10 days ago (2011-04-14) (Mac OS X)
April 6, 2011; 18 days ago (2011-04-06) (Linux)) [+/−]
Preview release [+/−]
Written in Embarcadero Delphi / Objective-C (Mac OS X/iPhone) / C++ with Qt4 (Linux)
Operating system Cross-platform
Available in Multilingual

Beginnings

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.

eBay has its share of controversy, ranging from its privacy policy (eBay typically turns over user information to law enforcement without a subpoena) to well-publicized seller fraud. eBay data shows that less than .01% of all transactions result in a confirmed case of fraud.