PayCircle, an industry organisation representing more than 30
companies including Hewlett-Packard, Oracle and Sun, has released a
specification for conducting mobile commerce via a Web services
paradigm. Other major vendors such as BEA Systems, IBM, and
Microsoft are not members of the organisation.
The PayCircle Payment Web Service Specification 1.0 is now
available for public review and for implementation in products. The
specification is intended to offer a standard way to provide mobile
commerce payment services for data services on devices such as PDAs
and mobile phones.
The focus of the specification is to enable mobile commerce via
standard APIs, which would be used by merchants and content and
ASPs.
PayCircle's specification uses Web services specifications WSDL and
Soap as well as XML to provide for payment services, according to
Jacob Christfort, vice-president of product development at Oracle's
mobile products and services division.
In the payment scheme, WSDL describes the information going back
and forth over the wire, Soap makes the service request, and the
Soap message is formatted using XML.
Service providers have to use multiple interfaces to communicate
payment information, Christfort said. "With this specification, you
just have to write one interface and it will automatically work
together with all the different billing systems."
PayCircle anticipated the specification would boost growth of
mobile commerce. Oracle, for its part, plans to support the
specification in the next version of the company's application
server, which will be discussed at the OracleWorld conference in
San Francisco next month.
But BEA Systems, considered to be the leading Java application
server vendor, is not a member of PayCircle, according to the
organisation's membership list. Microsoft and IBM are also not
listed.
The PayCircle specification potentially represents a new division
in the Web services standards arena, which already has seen
companies such as Oracle and Sun at loggerheads with IBM,
Microsoft, and BEA over efforts in areas such as Web services
orchestration for e-business.
A key intention of PayCircle's effort is to enable
"micro-payments", which are transactions below $10, such as sending
a stock quote, which can cost more for the payment service than the
actual data service itself costs, Christfort said.
"Micro-payments are payments that fall below the feasibility of
traditional payment systems," such as credit card-based
transactions, Christfort added.
The PayCircle consortium was formed in January.