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Whatever Happened to Micropayments?
prostoalex writes "Remember Flooz? Or Beenz? With a few notable successes (PayPal, and that's about it) online micropayment industry is saving its success stories for future generations. New York Times reports about two nascent micropayment systems, one coming out of Stanford, one out of MIT, that are supposed to help the content producers and Internet users to engage in less-than-a-dollar financial transactions without huge overhead costs, so typical of credit card payments. BitPass requires you to purchase a virtual debit card with a certain amount on it to pay for products and services, and PepperCoin consolidates numerous micropayments into one bill that is then split between the content providers that managed to sell their product to the Internet user." I still believe that single penny transactions will revolutionize the net.
Call me an old curmudgeon but I think micropayments are just another new way to be (pardon the pun) nickel and dime'd to death. My bank already does it with service charges, my phone company does it with every little "feature", my cell company does it, et al ad nauseum.
The only ones that will PROFIT!!! from this are the big companies pushing it on us.
Trolling is a art,
The problem with there being competing systems for MicroPayments is that consumers don't want to have multiple accounts (well at least I don't anyway).
Let's say Slashdot joins MicroPayment provider X, and New York Times Online joins MicroPayment provider Y, I need to have accounts with X and Y if those 2 websites happen to be in my favourites.
Interoperability needs to be sorted out right up front; otherwise no one company will be successful.
The obvious players are Visa and Mastercard. I suspect that they are just treading water until there is a whiff of possible competition, at which point they will swoop in together make MicroPayments happen between them.