PayPal demonstrated its new NFC capabilities for the first time this week at the Mobile Beat 2011 conference in San Francisco.
Senior director of PayPal Mobile, Laura Chambers, gave the audience a demo of the new service by tapping two smartphones together to transfer a small sum.
Chambers noted that the technology gave people “an entirely new way” to shop or pay “anytime, anywhere and on any device.”
The peer-to-peer offering is currently only enabled for the Samsung Nexus S, but should be out on the wider Android market for other NFC enabled phones later this summer. Transaction fees for the service remain the same as online PayPal charges.
“Sometimes the most obvious solutions are the most elegant,” said Chambers as she buzzed cash between one phone and another.
PayPal says it will limit the amount of cash people can transfer to each other using the NFC service, but has yet to settle on an amount. The firm is also reluctant to offer any predictions about potential adoption but says it has updated its overall mobile usage estimates to anticipate total mobile payment volume of $3 billion by the end of 2011.
The firm says it currently has eight million mobile users and can see up to $10million in transactions a day.
