October 30, 2000

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Editor: Karyl Scott (kscott@cmp.com)

A Remote control for E-commerce
Someday soon, you might use your personal digital assistant or cell phone to pay for a cab ride, buy food at a fast-food restaurant, or purchase a soda from a vending machine without using cash or a credit or ATM card.

Andersen Consulting's research and development department has developed a prototype technology called Mobile Micropayments that, if commercialized, could let you zap payments over wireless links without having to load a special application on your handheld.

The technology lets the wireless network and communicating devices know the mobile device's location and offer location-specific services to the consumer, says Anatole Gershman, an associate partner with Andersen Consulting's research and development lab in Northbrook, Ill.

"Think of the mobile device as your remote control to the world for all sorts of E-commerce," Gershman says. "The wireless network will constantly trickle information to the consumer's cell phone or PDA and deliver useful information and services based on where the person is and what he's doing."

The micropayment technology is based on patent-pending research concepts and is designed to illustrate how consumers can purchase goods and services using an Internet billing solution via a wireless device or mobile phone. The Mobile Micropayments prototype incorporates the existing Qpass Inc. product to handle payment and billing. Qpass is commonly used to automatically pay road tolls using a small device you affix to your windshield.

Here's how Andersen's micropayments prototype works: Imagine you're walking past a vending machine but are out of change. Automatically, the screen of your mobile phone or PDA lights up with a menu of the drinks available from the machine. You then enter your personal identification number to authenticate the transaction and make your selection. The information is passed to the machine, which dispenses the soda and bills your online account.

A key aspect of this technology is that you don't need to have a complex, custom application loaded on your handheld device. The vending machine or merchant device handles the processing, says Neill Cameron, Andersen Consulting's director of research incubation for Europe. The handheld is a dumb terminal that handles only payment authorization. This does away with the heavy infrastructure normally associated with wireless, he says.

Devices such as printers, cash registers, and vending machines will soon be able to communicate seamlessly with mobile phones that come within range, reconfiguring the display menus, options, and offerings as needed to enable various microtransactions, Andersen says.

Andersen's prototype uses infrared signals to enable two-way communication between the cell phone and other devices. In the future, short-range radio technologies such as the emerging Bluetooth wireless standard will further expand the range of possibilities for this type of application.

--Matthew G. Nelson

Illustration by Victoria Kann

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Affordable TeleConferencing via the web
3Cube Inc. unveiled the latest version of its hosted product, PhoneCube, an Internet-based solution for scheduling and initiating phone conferences via the Web with a few mouse clicks. PhoneCube offers complete conference-management capabilities, including the ability to dynamically dial and disconnect conference participants in the same conference session, something that isn't possible to do with other existing teleconferencing services.

PhoneCube lets managers of meetings share documents in more than 40 formats, including Adobe Acrobat, Corel WordPerfect, Microsoft Word, and PowerPoint.

PhoneCube requires a computer with Internet access, a Web browser, and a telephone for the audio portion. PhoneCube is based on computer telephony and relies on the customer's existing standard telephone lines, but offers superior sound quality. The service doesn't require any special hardware, additional proprietary software, or plug-ins.

PhoneCube eliminates many of the high costs seen with conventional operator-assisted or reservation-based conferencing and provides customers with more features and greater manageability than conventional services. The initiator of the conference has control of the call with mute, hold, disconnect, redial, and real-time status options. For 27 cents per minute per participant, you get phone conferencing with call-in and call-out capabilities. Also available are complete Web-presentation capabilities, including document sharing and real-time collaboration, and instant text messaging. International per-minute charges apply to participants and the conference manager. Visit the Phonecube.com Web site for a list of international rates.

--Jason Levitt

Illustration by Victoria Kann

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