Society for Technical Communication—Israel Chapter

Today many of us shop over the Internet. We order books or music through amazon.com or purchase clothing from Lands End (and have it sent to our relatives in the old country). All these purchases are done using credit cards. 

Credit card companies typically charge 25 cents per transaction, making it impractical to sell items for say 3 cents. There are incredible opportunities for new markets that would open up if we could easily and profitably buy and sell low cost items over the Internet. IBM Micro Payments is new technology that will allow people to buy and sell very low cost items -micropayments-over the Internet.

How Does it Work?

IBM Micro Payments involves four basic parties: the buyer who uses the Wallet component, the seller who uses the Merchant software, and the party who uses the Billing Server software to manage the accounts and transactions.

To buy information or services, you simply click on an IBM Micro Payments link, and the cursor changes to a dollar or cent sign, depending on how much the items costs. The actual price is displayed in the status bar at the bottom of the browser.

IBM Micro Payments opens up entirely new e-commerce markets. Examples of parties that would act as  Billing Servers are ISPs, banks, telcos. They could add micropayments to their existing billing services. Merchants taking advantage of micropayments might be:  music companies selling songs for 5 cents a piece, programmers selling templates,  stock quotes, newspapers charging for archive search and retrieval, magazines offering individual articles instead of subscriptions, advertisers paying surfers to encourage visits to web sites.

The Micro Payments technology has obvious advantages for merchants and billing servers. What about us-the consumers? Right now, the web is a terrific source of free information and software. In all probability, if it's worth their while, many merchants will begin to offer information or services that were previously unavailable. In the hopes that we'll be trading quantity for quality, I feel that consumers will also benefit from the new technology.

Gaining Critical Mass

Similar to credit cards, micropayment technologies needs universal acceptability in order to really take off. Right now, IBM is leading the effort to establish a standard markup language for micropayments. The goal of this standard will be to allow micropayment systems to interact so that merchants anywhere to sell to buyers anywhere.

Project Documentation

Because the technology involves three different components directed at three different target audiences, there was a very wide range of documentation. This included:

Three user manuals for the Wallet, Merchant, and Billing Server software.

API (Application Programming Interface) Functional Reference which documents the code used as an interface between the Billing Server and Merchant software and existing billing systems.

The Web Site had to be redesigned to accommodate the new content. I worked with the web master to develop a new navigation concept and choose a design that would work well with the type of material we had to present. The different sections of the site had to allow for an introduction, downloads, demos, papers and publications, and a page for Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ). The web site has since been evolved to use the newer IBM web site design and is now independently maintained by the IBM Micro Payments team members.

The Brochure was originally created using Corel Draw and one of the many attractive templates. About two years ago I sat down with a professional graphic artist and revamped the brochure to include a more sophisticated looking graphic design.

Articles. Over the past year I've written two articles on the IBM Micro Payments technology. One appeared on the IBM Research intranet site and the other in IBM's Think magazine. Both of these articles were intended to provide exposure for the technology within the IBM community.

"And there arose a new king.."

Now that the group has a new project leader, there have been many changes to the software components. The technology does the same thing, but doesn't look or work the same way. Most of the documentation cannot be salvaged from the older versions. The user interface is being given a total face lift and as a result all the manuals have to be redone. This is the exciting challenge that lies ahead of me right now.