PayPal has confirmed it is testing a service whereby users can send payments via their mobile devices, including cell phones and Blackberries. MobileCrunch broke the news Wednesday on its blog, which shows a screenshot of the service (http://www.mobilecrunch.com).

Amanda Pires, PayPal's Director of Corporate Communications, said the company is running a private beta for employees and had not planned to announce the service for a couple of weeks. Initially the service will be rolled out in the U.S., Canada and the UK, and Pires said they see opportunities in other markets as well.

The new service will have three applications - a user-to-user payment application, a text-to-buy application, and a text-to-give application.

The user-to-user application allows PayPal users to send a payment to another person via text-messaging. The sender must know the recipient's mobile phone number or email address.

The text-to-buy service will allow users to purchase items that have a product code advertised - in a magazine ad, for example. In this case, the sender uses her mobile device to enter the product code; PayPal will use an automated voice recording (AVR) to call the sender back, at which time she enters her pin number, assigned at the time of initial activation.

The third service, text-to-give, allows users to send money to their favorite charity. For example, a musician might exhort concert attendees to send payments to her favorite cause, and charity-minded attendees could immediately send money to the charity via text-messaging.

With these applications, merchants and charities will be able to track the source of inspiration for purchases and donations.

Recent press reports show other companies are working on mobile payment services. PayPal's Pires said the mobile service had been an initiative at PayPal for several months.

Ironically, the PayPal service was initially conceived as a way for users to send money - called beaming - to each other using their Palm Pilot PDAs. According to Eric Jackson's book, "The PayPal Wars," PayPal's first venture capital funds were "beamed" to them at a media press conference in 1999. The company even hired Star Trek actor James Doohan as its spokesperson with a "Beam me up, Scotty" theme, but it was ultimately eBay auction payments that fueled PayPal's success, and eBay acquired PayPal in 2002.

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