PayPal continues to dominate the electronic-payment market online, but Google Inc. is making continual challenges to this situation. In order to remain the leader, PayPal must move from being merely 'big' to being ubiquitous, and it must do so while facing threats from Google, a very powerful and rich rival. PayPal was founded in 1998 to provide a way to move money between Palm Pilots. It became very popular as a method for paying goods on eBay, the online auction site, and in 2002, eBay eliminated its own payment service to buy PayPal for $1.5 billion. With international payments increasing, PayPal is aiming to become a truly global service, and it is expected to announce that the areas for PayPal transfers have grown from 103 countries to 190. The growth has transformed PayPal into a star at eBay's group of companies. Its net revenues in the first quarter of 2007 rose 31 percent. However, now that it has reached 'critical mass,' PayPal must convince more online retailers to accept it as a method of payment. A problem with this is the time involved in adding a PayPal checkout function to a website. The company has developed an innovative and secure way to use PayPal on sites that do not have the appropriate button, which uses a 'virtual debit card' to take money from a subscriber's PayPal account using a 16-digit number that changes with every transaction. Google Checkout has several advantages over PayPal, including the company's willingness to operate Checkout at a break-even point or even at a loss.