Roughly a year ago we talked about eBay’s acquisition of mobile payment company Zong with the idea to integrate some of its capabilities into PayPal. A year later, we have PayPal announcing acquisition of card.io, the company that provides technology for developers to capture credit card information by using the camera on a smartphone. Instead of typing all those numbers, card.io-enabled apps allow users to take a photo of their credit card with card.io’s software doing all the work in the background, processing information from the image to make transactions happen.
In its blog post, PayPal wasn’t too specific how it plans to use card.io’s technology but we can easily envision a new feature in PayPal’s mobile apps that will make adding funds to one’s PayPal account super easy. Additionally, I’m sure some parts of card.io SDK will be included in PayPal’s SDK, providing an additional option for app developers and eventually making mobile payments that much better. We’ll see how that goes…