Their platform, called Paypal X, is an API that will allow developers to tailor Paypal’s infrastructure for their own sites. Paypal themselves are highlighting the potential for micropayments that the platform might allow – Osama Bedier, the vice president of platform, told the FT: “I can pay 10 cents for something in real life. I can’t do that online”. The key with micropayments is to make them a) fast and b) not feel like you’re actually paying money; logging into Paypal and using one-click purchasing fills both of those criteria. Plus the traction Paypal already has with web users means that many won’t even have to bother signing up to a new service – it looks well placed to expand into the micropayment sector, as long as its API isn’t a total ballache to work with.

Paypal is looking ever more likely to be eBay’s saviour. Unlike Skype, Stumbleupon and others, Paypal is one of the only acquisitions the cash-drunk eBay made that actually dovetailed with its core business; the cash it’s generating is now accelerating eBay’s revenues even while the auctions business struggles to grow. Developers do have various beefs with Paypal in its current form, from seller protection to simplicity of use for customers. Paypal X is presumably designed to iron these out, and carry on growing eBay’s revenues – we’ll find out when it gets announced later today in San Francisco.

It comes as Amazon is expanding its payment platform, with PayPhrase. It’s a simple text field that you enter a special phrase into, something teeth-grindingly “funky” like “feisty mango”, rather than your email and password; along with a four-digit PIN it links to a set of specified billing and shipping info, and you can set up different phrases for different addresses, credit cards etc. The WSJ reports on some of the suggested phrases generated by Amazon (“Ingrained Abhorrance”, anyone?), while the Business Insider notes that the web stores currently partnered with Amazon for the scheme aren’t exactly chasing Paypal’s numbers. Still, early days yet.

Then of course there’s Facebook’s nascent attempt at internet domination, with Facebook Connect and Facebook Credits. Currently accepted by basically no-one, the credits are getting talked up today in the WSJ by interactive gaming developers Playfish – because they act as virtual currency, cross-border payment problems are solved. If you’re a developer wanting to start your own payment platform, think on – it’s not looking like there’s going to be much more market room outside of these three players.

The most surprising bit of news to come out of the Lehman coals being raked over is in the Guardian today, who say that Hank Paulson is blaming Alastair Darling for not voicing his concerns sooner over letting the bank fail; the UK’s banking elite believed that after Barclays’ attempts to take over the bank failed, the US government would provide support. Whatever the reason, the decision to let it fail has, with 20-20 hindsight, being given an unequivocal thumbs down, the FSA’s Hector Sants calling it a “mistake”, deputy Bank of England governor John Gieve calling it a “catastrophic error”. But if you remember Paulson’s press conference just weeks later when he announced that the Treasury was bailing out AIG, and his disbelieving, shaken delivery of that news, it’s easy to see that for a man like him, the idea of state and business joining hands was simply unthinkable, and was never going to happen.

When it fell, some of the big assets got quickly snapped up, like its European and Asian trading unit, which was bought by Nomura after they conducted a ceremony to ward off evil spirits in the Canary Wharf building (there must still be some bad juju floating around, as they’ve since moved, rent-free, nearer to the City). But other assets, like Lehman Brothers pens, are still hanging around a warehouse somewhere like a bad smell. Lehman have set up an eBay store to get rid of all this tat, which includes endless golfing paraphanalia, silver plated babies’ rattles, wine accessories and baby romper suits. “Own a piece of history” runs the tagline. As well as this desperately small change, they’re also collating rather more valuable assets, like the uranium they own.

Maybe once they’ve sold all the leather paperweights they’ll have enough to pay off the potential $100bn they owe to over 100 different claimants, for any number of different services, trades and deals that were going on at the time of the bankruptcy. PriceWaterhouseCoopers, the administrator for the bank, is filing its claim in a couple of weeks, just over a year after the bank fell. 

Also in a commemorative mood are the BBC. They’ve got Robert Peston currently filming in New York to mark the big day, radio play The Day That Lehman Died broadcasting tomorrow on the World Service, and glossy-looking The Last Days Of Lehman Brothers on BBC2, starring Corey Johnson as Dick Fuld and James Cromwell looking like he’s in full ball-crushing 24/LA Confidential mode as Hank Paulson. Expect lots of shakycam closeups of people sweating into phones intercut with placid brooding faces gazing out of reflective glass.

As for us, we’ll be marking the anniversary of the financial crisis in a few weeks in a very exciting way. Keep your eyes peeled for more news as Bad Idea steps up a gear…

It’s going to go under an Initial Public Offering, ie on the stock market, which seems weird considering that the markets’ moods are less predictable than a teenager’s at the moment, and no-one’s been doing any IPOs over the last few months. But the floatation won’t happen until 2010, so it’ll get a headwind of hype and excitement, maybe even a bidding war from buy-out firms prepared to pay over the eventual valuation. Given the popularity already of the Skype iPhone app, we can presume that the brand will be all the stronger come next year. Though Martin Peers at the Wall Street Journal suggests that growth will be limited thanks to calls being free, and that given Skype made $116m profit last year, the $1.7bn that eBay will want for it seems like a lot.

Even if they do get that much for it, it’s still a hefty loss for eBay on their original investment. eBay has also just announced it’s selling back web recommendation service StumbleUpon to its original owners, after they bought it for $75m back in 2007. “We realized there were few long-term synergies between the two businesses”, said StumbleUpon founder Garrett Camp. So “lack of synergy” seems to be a running theme here – eBay, flush from its brilliant core business, thought it should and could move with the times, or at least be seen to be doing so. But now they’re having to turn back to the auctions, something they should never have strayed from in the first place.

eBay resisted a buyback offer from Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who look like an attendee at a caravan trade show and a trance producer respectively; they had pulled together a group of private equity firms to fund the purchase. The Guardian suggests that thanks to a beef over the Global Index technology that the pair licence to Skype, eBay is snubbing Zennstrom and Friis with the IPO. Take that, Scandos!

Maybe Zennstrom and Friis can now concentrate on turning the Joost platform they invested in into a viable TV equivalent of fellow Scandinavian ad-funded success story Spotify. At the moment it’s good for cartoons, the softest of porn, and little else, but surely has the potential to be massive. Maybe they could try and steal the music video market off YouTube while it festers in copyright law hell?

eBay store Echo Vintage Books and Vinyl has clearly been thinking outside the box for some fresh revenue streams, and come up with the idea of commemorative tiles decorated with a celeb photo picked out in blotchy black paint, priced at $29.99. I know, but some people will buy any old crap. 

There’s the celebs you might expect – Cruise, Cyrus, Obama – but then there’s some real niche curveballs – Desmond Tutu, short story writer Andre Dubus, Chesly Sullenberger aka that guy who landed that plane in the Hudson river. Chinese politicians and Indian cricketers also feature heavily. And best of all are a few stars of the financial crisis! Crooked senator Rod Blagojevich, chair of House Financial Services Committee Barney Frank, controversy plagued senator Chris Dodd, regulation-hating former Fed chair Alan Greenspan, and record fraudsters Bernie Madoff and Allen Stanford, the former “selling fast” and bumped up to $98, while the latter looks awfully like Hitler.

You can even set up your own ceramic talk-show firebrand face-off, with tiles of Bill O’Reilly and Keith Olbermann! Personally I’m going to be bidding for a tile of Dennis Farina. Nothing says “classy bathroom” like anachronistic C-list Italian comic actors.

As well as being effectively able to hit “Buy It Now” thanks to her position as the world’s 897th billionaire, her political credentials have been building ever since she stepped down as CEO of eBay in March last year. She backed the handsomely plastic-looking Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign train last year, before neatly hopping aboard McCain’s once he became the Republican candidate; McCain said she could be a future Treasury Secretary during the presidential debates last year: “She knows what it’s like to be out there in the marketplace. She knows how to create jobs”. Sorry John, but getting America to sell up all that crap they’ve got in the loft isn’t exactly the long-term fiscal stimulus that’s needed.

Whitman held the CEO post at eBay for 10 years, starting out when there were just 30 employees. In that time, she achieved a staggering amount – took the number of employees to 15,500; bought Skype, PayPal, Shopping.com, Gumtree and a quarter of Craigslist; moved into China via a deal with Chinese internet provider Tom; got it to where it’s turning over $8.46bn a year. Shame the whole Skype thing didn’t really pan out though.

She’s toothy and cosy-looking with an edge of pure steel, like Cilla Black crossed with Margaret Thatcher, and is married to a brain surgeon called Griffith Rutherford Harsh IV (yikes!). She looked after Mr Potato Head for a while, but she loses nice-points thanks to her support for the ban on gay marriage that got passed in California last year, which pretty much rules out the pink vote come 2010. Another thorn in her side is Thomas Hall, who sneakily bought up domain names like whitman2010.com; Whitman’s team spent loads of money trying to get them back and has thus far failed. I’m sure she’ll still be able to come up with something catchy though. After all, eBay was going to be called Echobay before some mining company stopped them. Go for two syllables at most Meg – WhitGov, GovWhit, something like that.