Whatever Happened to Micropayments? 318
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.
Payment System (Score:5, Informative)
What worked best was simply putting an inexpensive yearly fee in place. People pay once and can forget about worrying about any recurring charges or running up some kind of tab that will only come back and surprise them later.
After a year, more than half of them renew their accounts too. And just so they can have access to a giant database of humorous, strange, and twisted photos and media files. Go figure ...
Try Xanadu (Score:2, Informative)
It was set up originally to help content manufacturers so they could choose how much to reimburse their goods with. You could choose free, if you wanted.
Bandwidth still costs no matter what, so this could at least pay for bandwidth. And who WOULDNT pay
Xanadu also provided for searchable media: An mpeg movie is linked from IMBD to a section of frame 23508-24003 on the movie servers. The content people then would access a porportinate cost to that snippet. Who wouldnt agree to pay 4cents for that access?
And now for those whining that that network wouldnt be "All Pay", if you create content, you can get money too. It's like a payment counter that goes both ways rapidly.
Instead the HTML One-Way links, dead links, leeches, and no accountability system started. And it started ONLY because Xanadu was closed, secret system then (80's-early 90's), and HTTP/HTML was Public, known system.
This has been answered! (Score:5, Informative)
Read this article about micropayments first (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2000/12/19/microp ayments.html [openp2p.com]
Rich.
Re:Micropayments with the iTunes Music Store? (Score:4, Informative)
They also clump together purchases made over a 48 hour period into one, larger purchase, cutting down further on bank fees...
Re:Micropayments with the iTunes Music Store? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Missing the Obvious (Score:2, Informative)
Interesting, but not true. There are stores (such as Scan, at the Columbia, MD mall) that do not take cash. It may be different if I already have a debt, and attempt to repay in cash, but that does not mean that someone must always be willing to take cash for a good or service.
Re:Missing the Obvious (Score:3, Informative)
Sorry, wrong. Here's the US Treasury FAQ page [ustreas.gov] for this question.
Here's the main point:
There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person or an organization must accept currency or coins as for payment for goods and/or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether or not to accept cash...