Well, that didn’t take long: shortly after Google’s announcement of its new mobile payment service, Google Wallet, PayPal sued the company as well as two of its former executives over trade secrets.
According to PayPal’s lawsuit, which can be read in full here, former PayPal executive (now working at Google) Osama Bedier stole PayPal’s trade secrets and shared it with Google and other companies. Another present Googler and former PayPal exec, Stephanie Tilenius, violated her contract when she recruited Bedier, PayPal said.
“We treat PayPal’s “secrets” seriously, and take it personally when someone else doesn’t. So we made a decision today. We filed a lawsuit against Google and two former colleagues who now work there, Osama Bedier and Stephanie Tilenius,” says PayPal’s Amanda Pires in an official blog post.
Why has PayPal decided to sue Google less than a day after the announcement of Google Wallet? GigaOm‘s sources claim that PayPal is working on a similar system, due to be announced in the following days. Bedier has extensive knowledge of PayPal’s work in the mobile payments space – knowledge he took with him when he went to Google – and PayPal suspects some of it was instrumental for the creation of Google Wallet. It’s easy to see why PayPal is reaching for lawyers, but we’ll have to hear Google’s side of the story before reaching for conclusions.
A Google spokesman said in an e-mail to Bloomberg that the company hasn’t received a copy of the lawsuit, and will not comment on it until it has reviewed it.
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