E-commerce shoots for the hip pocket

Security and ease are the first and last names of the electronic commerce game. But when it's time to pay, e-tailers have had a hard time convincing on-line consumers that any place for their wallet is better than their back pockets. Electronic wallets have been tested, sometimes with big name support, but none has caught on.

Two entrants to the Web wallet arena hope they can change that using different architectures. eWallet offers to save consumers the time and effort of filling in on-line order forms by placing that information in an application that resides on their desktops. Consumers download the free 1 Mbyte application from the Internet, assign it a personal identification number and enter credit card information. Once they've reached a buying decision at a participating seller's Web site, they enter the PIN, drag the proper card from the eWallet pop-up screen above their browser and drop it onto the purchase order. Merchants link to the eWallet site without adding any code to their Web sites.

"The user is in control of the data," said Francis Costello, chief operating officer of eWallet. "It's not getting sucked off your machine, we're not putting it on any central server anywhere, it's encrypted locally and on your machine. You're choosing to talk to this merchant, using their secure sockets layer [SSL] protocol." With other wallets, he said, "People say, wait-you're going to keep my data on some server in the sky? And they get nervous. One server with a whole bunch of credit card numbers on it makes a tempting target."

eWallet's approach may help it succeed where predecessors have failed, said Jack Staff, e-commerce analyst for Zona Research. "We see an iteration from having the electronic wallet in a merchant system like CyberCash, to having it on the portal, to keeping it on the desktop," he said. "That makes a lot of sense."

But eWallet requires a download by the consumer-always a drag on growth, though on Dec. 17 the company reported 100,000 downloads in its first three weeks of operation.

Transactor Networks believes consumers are more shy of taking software off the Web than they are of putting possibly sensitive information onto a third-party server-provided they receive security assurances. The company will offer W@llet in first quarter 1999 and has been testing it.

W@llet encrypts consumers' credit information with 128-bit encryption-the same SSL used in most Internet home banking, said Transactor CEO Ron Martinez, as opposed to the 40-bit SSL most Web merchants use. That information is held on Transactor's servers on a separate network. When consumers want to buy from a participating merchant, they pull down a W@llet bookmark, calling up a "daughter" window. That window contacts Transactor's server, which loads in Java script site drivers and loads in information the site will require. When consumers are ready to buy, they hit a button and the appropriate information is filled in.

W@llet's pilot project was sponsored by Citibank N.A. Martinez said no agreements have been signed to continue that sponsorship intothe full product rollout, but he expects Transactor will try to maintain an association with Citibank or another large financial institution. "We all get nervous about storing sensitive information in the ether," Martinez said. "Banks will not put their names on anything that has not gone through rigorous security reviews. And to consumers, a great bank name is not just a logo, it's a trust mark." Banks have been "sleeping giants" in e-commerce until now, he added, restricting their participation to home banking.

Maintaining a third-party server allows Transactor to offer customized marketing mechanisms and customer services beyond simply filling out purchase orders, Martinez said.

FASTV LETS SURFERS SEARCH WEB VIDEO FASTV let visitors to its Web site search and bookmark multimedia clips of the Iraqi bombings and President Clinton's address to the nation before the congressional impeachment vote. The company digitized and indexed news coverage of the events so viewers could enter a keyword such as "Hussein" and find relevant clips.

CALL FOR 'COOL APPS' ITXC and Dialogic Corp. will join pulver.com in sponsoring a contest for the best IP telephony application at this year's Voice on the Net conference April 13-16 in Las Vegas. A five-judge panel will present awards to entrants who offer enhanced voice-over-IP services for public networks, customer premises and end users.