The PayPal Rally

PayPal in Germany recently conducted an interesting experiment to see how far you can get in the offline world using just an iPhone and a PayPal account.

The firm equipped two competing teams on a trip from their hometowns to Hamburg – approximately 280 miles – with instructions that they could only pay for any goods and services they needed using PayPal.

One team started off in Cologne the other hit the road from Berlin. With two days to arrive in Hamburg, the teams had to figure out how to pay for their trips, find a place to stay overnight and buy the food they needed, always using PayPal.

PayPal has posted a nine-minute video of the experiment on YouTube. Suffice to say, both teams made it in the end - but it would have been a damn sight easier using conventional cash and credit/debit cards.