PayPal awards first winners of Battle Hack in Toronto

The winning developer team of Maya Kenedy, Alex Christodoulou, Christopher Larsen, and Ernst Riemer from Pivotal Labs took home the coveted Viking axe trophies and a paid trip to the Battle Hack World Finals later this year.

PayPal just announced the winners of its inaugural Battle Hack competition in Toronto. Local developers were tasked to develop mobile apps that incorporate PayPal’s application programming interface or Braintree or Venmo Software Development Kits to solve community issues. Team Angry Kittens won the Toronto competition and has secured a spot at the PayPal Battle Hack World Finals in San Jose, California in November. They will compete with winners from 13 other cities including Berlin, Boston, Chicago, Istanbul, London, Miami, Mexico City, Moscow, San Francisco, Singapore, Sydney, Tel Aviv, and Warsaw. The winner of that global competition will take home US$100,000 and be named the “Ultimate Hackers for Good.”

Team Angry Kittens created the Security Blanket mobile app with the use of Beacon, Bluetooth Low Energy technology, and Twilio to help parents track missing children. PayPal is used to have people donate to help locate the children or supply sensors to help find them. The team also hopes to use the app to monitor the whereabouts of Alzheimer’s patients and even pets.

Now may be a good time to change your eBay password

eBay has been hacked in what many called a historic breach with 145 million user records taken by hackers. This breach happened three months ago and we're only hearing about it now. User passwords were among the many bits of information taken so every eBay buyer and seller should go in and change their password to make sure thaty they are safe from further invasion. 

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Google adds PayPal support for Play Store

You can now use your PayPal account to pay for purchases from Google’s Play Store. Canada is one of the 12 countries that can use their PayPal accounts to purchase apps, games, books, music, movies, and other in-app purchases. PayPal will be added as an option in Google Wallet. It will just require you to enter your PayPal login details. Google did not indicate if you will need to enter your login credentials every time though. Let us know when you try it out.

Source: Android Developers

PayPal's fingerprint authentication and app available on Samsung Galaxy S5, Gear 2 and Gear Fit

PayPal is announcing the availability of the PayPal app with fingerprint authentication on the new Samsung Galaxy S5 device. When shopping with PayPal on their Samsung Galaxy S5, users can login with their fingerprint to shop at millions of merchants that accept PayPal on mobile web sites, mobile apps and in stores. Additionally, Samsung Galaxy S5 users who use the PayPal app will receive $50 USD or more in offers at several merchants that accept PayPal.

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