Verified tags

As we have seen before, conferred identity (for example, a driving licence) can be used instead of the primary identity. For example, conferred identity can be used to buy a range of services in the physical world (for instance you can show your driving license to buy services). In the digital world, tags / avatars etc are all a form of identity. However, they are not verified.

To achieve the concept of ‘I am not a number..’ you need a verified tag.

How can we verify the tag? You could use something like the Liberty alliance or similar mechanism. But that’s too ‘top down’, complex and expensive. But let us put this in perspective first; as indicated before,  A phone call is not a transaction!. The stakes are a lot less lower. In this case, rather than a full fledged approach (such as liberty alliance), which is expensive, a simpler more organic approach could suffice. This approach is based on the concept of ‘Identity = reputation’. Reputation is what others say about me on the Web. That’s an organic way to ‘verify’ me i.e. my tag. A verified tag allows me to be identified and verified, but not because who I say I am, but because others can validate what I say. This makes the mechanism a ‘closed loop’ system. In contrast, the Internet allows me to set up an ID called ‘John Smith’, without proof. I can then take someone’s verified ID and can communicate to another channel. As this is open; it can be abused.

The next logical question is: how to capture that ‘reputation’? And here, lets introduce another word ‘Pingerati . Trackbacks ^[3] are decentralised. In the sense, that when we trackback something, a link is created between the blog we are tracking back from and ‘my’ blog.  Supposing, every time you tracked back, there was a ‘ping’ (hence Pingerati!) to another site; that site would then hold all your trackbacks ever.
Why is this useful?

Imagine there is a place on the Web where I could store all my trackbacks, then that place becomes an implicit profile. Maybe it could even be my own blog. Thus, my blog would contain all my blog entries, all the comments on my blogs but also all the comments I have made on other people’s blogs in a separate section. An algorithm (PeopleRank) could then process all that information to create a ranking/probability indicating who I am.

Addressing

So, thus far we have seen how we could identify a tag based reputation. Our goal is to make a ‘Internet originated phone call’ to that tag now that we have reliably identified the tag. The question arises, how to ‘place’ this call from the Web? If this is a mobile phone, how can we bridge the ‘fixed to mobile’ gap? From a telecoms perspective, to place an IP call to someone on a mobile IP network, you need their IP address. That address may be mapped to any identifier (tag, avatar etc), but an IP address is required. We also need to know presence information: Is the ‘tag’ available to accept phone calls. On first impressions, the requirement of knowing the IP address in advance sounds very daunting. In fact, it may not be so as we show below.

 We can think of two ways you can ‘call’ a phone.

a) SkypeOut and

 b) Naked SIP

 SkypeOut

The first and the simplest is to use an enhanced version of a mechanism like ‘SkypeOut’^[4]. SkypeOut  has a profile and can already call any phone including a mobile phone. So, we need the Identity and presence features which are missing at the moment. Presence can also be provided by the user manually or through rules (Between 7 to 9 in the evening, call me on my home number).

 Naked SIP: “Naked SIP” is SIP without IMS. Please refer to the section on ‘Naked SIP’ for an explanation of it’s significance. Naked SIP provides plus third party applications an addressing mechanism to a phone which is independent of a Telecoms network provider.

 Conclusions and Observations

From the above discussion, we see that:

a) I am not a number; I am a tag  can be implemented at multiple levels; either as a simple ‘SkypeOut’ call or through naked SIP in the future.

b) Identity can be implemented organically through ‘Pingerati’.

 c) To some extent, we already use the Web to check identity manually. How many times have you ‘Googled’ someone to ‘check out’ who they are? That’s an ID check!

 d) To recap, it's more about convenience. When Amazon was first launched, many people thought it was about cheaper books. Today, we don’t expect cheap books from Amazon – but we get ‘something more’ i.e. the choice. Similarly, with this concept – you get all the numbers in one place, you get presence information and you can call the numbers from the Web.

 References: Marc Canter : Breaking the web wide open ^[5]The disruptive potential of Wi-Fi and WiMAX 

Good article by Alistair Fairweather titled Four Very Different Mobile Payment Services  - there is more on the article than here and worth a read

This is his advantage and disadvantages and my added comments in colour

Approach one: Phones as credit card machines (Square)

Advantages

Ubiquity and familiarity of credit cards (at least in developed economies);

A clever and comfortingly familiar payment interface; and

The focus on small businesses and vendors has given them cheap and effective market penetration.

Disadvantages

Requires physical proximity between buyer and seller;

Requires a smart phone and special additional hardware (although it is free); and

Requires the buy-in of (historically unfriendly) banks and credit card companies (which may slow or limit international adoption).

All your lovely data is still not yours and make is easy for the status quo to remain, you can see some natural support from certain players who want to remain in power.

Approach two: phones as swipe cards (Google, Orange, Samsung, Barclays and many others)

Advantages

Incredibly simple and intuitive interface for users – just wave, beep and go;

Very quick and efficient for vendors of all kinds. No fiddling with change or waiting for credit card machines; and

Caters for “unmanned” purchases, such as vending machines.

Assumes that banking and payment separate

Disadvantages

Requires new technology at every payment point;

Very few handsets currently support it – although by 2014 that may have changed;

The old chicken-and-egg dilemma: merchants won’t adopt it until customers do, and vice versa;

If your phone is stolen, you’ve now also lost your credit card. Yikes.

Ah ah – you run out of battery….

All your lovely data is still not yours and could present certain strong players in an old sector with new powers to maintain dominance.

Assumes that banking and payment  

There is no escape

Approach three: SIM and/or USSD based mobile money transfers (M-Pesa)

Advantages

Lowest barriers to entry, since it works on more than 95 percent of handsets;

Low transaction costs; and

No bank account or credit card required.

Where there is nothing to compete with – probably unbeatable

Cannot be tracked (well you can but lets pretend)

Disadvantages

Tends to concentrate cash in some people’s hands and credit in others’, so physical cash transfers are still an issue, if a less frequent one;

Locks users into a particular mobile network provider; and

Since network operators are not banks, they cannot pay interest, offer credit, or other useful banking services, such as debit orders.

Power shift to operator and SIM – they think they have control but UI is so rubbish it makes programming a VCR clock look simple

Your data goes from Silo to big fat pipe

Approach four: voucher-based systems (MiMoney, AMMO)

Advantages

Familiar to consumers because of its similarity to airtime ;

No special hardware required by either customers or vendors;

No bank account or credit card required; and

Very safe since loss is limited to the value of vouchers. There’s no direct access to your bank account.

Cannot be tracked (well you can but lets pretend)

Disadvantages

Requires a bank account or credit card to be used most effectively. Trekking to a kiosk with cash sort of defeats the point of mobile money;

Without special hardware, the interface is clumsy for both vendor and customer. A credit card is still quicker and easier;

You cannot get the cash out once it is in the system unless you’re a merchant, so it’s very much a purchase-focused network, unlike M-Pesa.

The same chicken-and-egg dilemma as NFC.

All your lovely data is still not yours and could present certain strong players in an old sector with new powers to maintain dominance.

This is an Article from Banking Technology by a sound and hugely respected friend David Birch

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As the mobile payments area looks set to take finally take off, the next big area for payments services will be identity and authentication, according to a leading commentator.

Digital money specialist Dave Birch, a director of Consult Hyperion, this week told the annual Payment Strategies Conference - organised by Experian Identity and Fraud - that "the evolution of an identity market is the next big step" in developing mobile payments and related services. But he warned that "the technologies involved are very different to those in the connectivity space".

"In the mass market, biometrics are about convenience, not security," he said.

Birch lambasted traditional banks and payments providers for their failure to grasp the nature of the opportunities presented by mobile technologies, which has led them to miss the boat. "I'm almost embarrassed to stand before you and say that I thought that banks and mobile operators could work together," he told the conference. "It was a stupid fantasy for which I apologise."

This has meant that it has taken longer for the infrastructure to develop than he'd predicted, but more importantly, banks are still missing out: only recently, banks in the US had told him that there is no business case for subsidising the installation of contactless readers in retail premises, just as Google was announcing that it will.

It get ever so interesting as we separate Payments from Banking and Security from Networks ( especially in the mobile domain with eSIM or SoftSIM)  as this opens up the opportunity for any brand to get access to your transaction data.  As Google has already noted in their moves with Google Wallet, they don’t want 1% of a transaction fee (revenue) they want 100% of a companies marketing spend which is 10% of revenue – smart move, there is something in this identity and digital footprint!

https://www.tokenpay.com/

Mission is to provide a full service, 100% anonymous online transaction solution.  Claims to take privacy and security to all new levels of protection through a closed-loop network allowing for complete anonymity and untraceable online transactions. You are able to maintain undisclosed your online spending habits as we pass absolutely no personal or account information on to the merchant. With Token Pay you keep your money, financial details, and identity safe, secure and private. They offer

Indemnification of transactions and no chargebacks.

And they are located…. DRS Holdings, Chancery Court Leeward Highway, Turks And Caicos Islands, BWI

Assuming you keep your own “data” – this has the weakest of all levels of security !

infographic courtesy of Microsoft Tag.

Smartphones are creating smarter shoppers – so how does that affect you? Check out our new infographic below to learn about the growth of mobile e-commerce, including how people are shopping on their phones, how many retailers have mobile sites (it's astonishingly small, considering over half of smartphone users would buy something from a mobile site), and which demographic makes purchases on their phones the most. This will be on the test...because by 2015, it's predicted that mobile purchases will total $119 billion globally!

Original article from CNN Money “New cash transfer service rivals PayPal”

The vision of clearXchange is that you use your friends ID in some way to transfer money and hence take on PayPal as the dominant force in P2P payments.

At the end of the article is a piece Your bank is profiling you! but it does not quite make the point that this allows access into transaction your were party to, but did not complete in the traditional way and who your friends are. More data about you.

The question becomes that do we [the public] understand that for convenience of these services we are entering into the barter of data for service and that this data has more value that the ability to settle a debt with a friend.  Whilst I am sure that this settlement route prevents fraud and money laundering – it also tells “someone” about how you use cash, which by its very nature does not have that level of traceability.