9781422270394

had met each other at PayPal early in 1999. He was one of the first designers with PayPal and one of the first engineers. We worked very closely together through the beginning of PayPal as well as through the acquisition by eBay.” PayPal did not exist for very long before it had a potential buyer. In 2002, it was offered as a publicly traded company, which meant that anyone could buy stocks and invest in PayPal. eBay, a budding online auction website, saw ways it could benefit from using PayPal. PayPal would make eBay’s service even more popular than it already was because customers would be able to pay sellers in a safer, more secure way. eBay seized the opportunity to acquire PayPal and bought the service for $1.5 billion in 2002. This buyout left the previous employees of PayPal with a lot of money and countless options for how they would spend it. Meanwhile, eBay continued to prosper from the use of PayPal, which became the preferred method of payment for many eBay users. CRACKING THE CODEC Digital video files were not all created or read the same way. There were many different video languages, or codecs, to choose from. To watch these videos, a user needed to download the required codec and install it into a media player. The media player then read the codec and was able to display a video that the user could actually watch. It was possible to translate a video from one codec to another, but this was a difficult task for anyone who was not a computer expert until the dawn of YouTube.

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