January 28, 2004

BitPass Micropayments User Survey. This post is a slight departure from our usual format here at Small Business Trends. I’m taking a few moments to describe our experience using the BitPass micropayments system.From time to time we post photographs on this site to relieve some of the visual monotony that comes from having so many words on a page. Most of the images come from istockphoto.com. They were purchased using a BitPass micropayments account. Our survey sample is admittedly tiny – one person, me. But I can report that using BitPass on 8 or 10 different occasions, the experience has been uniformly positive each time.
  • BitPass is a Web-based system, so all I need is a browser—no software to download. The BitPass user interface is streamlined. Screens don’t get much simpler to use.
  • Setting up my account initially was quick and easy. Just the bare minimum of information is requested. I was not required to provide age, gender, household income, hobbies, mother’s maiden name, or even number of pets.
  • The way micropayments work is that you purchase credits for your account (similar to buying a gift card). That process was very easy, too. I was given several ways to pay, including PayPal and credit cards such as Visa and Mastercard. I chose PayPal, and the interfaces with the PayPal system worked without a glitch. My initial $3 (USD) was transferred from my bank account to my BitPass account instantly.
  • Once I had a few dollars in my account, I went shopping. Off to istockphoto.com, where I downloaded photographs for $1(USD) each. Here again, using BitPass was fast and easy. As a user, I saw only two issues: First, photographs are twice as expensive using BitPass versus istockphoto.com’s own in-house version of micropayments ($1 versus $.50). Somehow BitPass is going to have to close that price gap. Second, outside of stock photographs, today there is very little content I would want to purchase using micropayments. Until there are more vendors offering desirable content who accept BitPass, usage will be limited.All signs suggest the market might be ready for micropayments to take off. The last time around, before the Internet bubble burst, micropayments never got much traction. Most of the original micropayments providers went under. But we are now in a different era, with paid Internet content gaining greater acceptance and music download services going mainstream and creating demand for micropayments. That said, a major issue looming on the horizon for BitPass and other micropayments vendors is competition from PayPal. A representative of PayPal has said "we think the stars are coming into alignment" on micropayments. PayPal recently kicked off its own micropayments rate. Backed by its parent, eBay, a cash-rich and well-run powerhouse of a company, PayPal could be a formidable competitor. [Small Business Trends]

    • 7:06:38 PM    

    Radio UserLand inspires remix artists. A recurring theme among Radio webloggers is how to take data in one form and render it in another. The software handles this task so well that it either turns people into information-remix junkies or attracts that kind of crowd. Radio supports text, HTML, XML, OPML, and RSS as input and output formats and can be extended to support others -- Atom, OCS, you name it -- with scripts written in the UserTalk language.

    One such junkie, Richard MacManus, will be replacing an OPML-to-HTML transformation of his site's topic list with an XML-to-HTML conversion:

    My ideal is to do the XSL transformation on the server-side, rather than the client (browser) side. The reason for this is that due to the proliferation of different browsers on the Web, it'll be a nightmare to second-guess how all of them will process the XSL transformation. Whereas with a server-side transformation, I know how my server will handle the task.

    Interesting project, but as I asked him, it seems like a waste not to use Radio. UserTalk's XML verbs can read the data and render it as a static HTML page, upstreaming it automatically, leaving less for the Web server to think about. [Rogers Cadenhead: Salon Blog Tips]


    7:06:03 PM    

    Adding Audio to Blogs. Don't know how I missed this, but it's been around for a month: SoundBlox is "an MP3 audio playing Internet application that can be embedded into a personal blog template or Web page, and displayed in any modern Web browser." It's for non-commercial use, which excludes me on this blog, but I still intend to play with it on another blog I use for experimentation. Nice. [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]
    7:04:23 PM    

    Okay time do some programming. First to-do -- update my subscription list at the Share Your OPML site. Then a little tweak -- there's now a white-on-orange XML icon on the page with my subscription list. Click on it to get the OPML version of the subscription list data. Next I'm going to switch and use it as my harmonizer. Enough procrastinating! [Scripting News]
    7:03:05 PM    

    © Copyright 2004 Ted Ritzer .
    Last update: 01/02/2004; 1:28:39 PM .

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