Digital Equipment Corp is a company seemingly in search for a new role in life. And to that end the idea of it touting one of the newest ways to enable electronic payments over the web is not the precursor to an initial public offering or sell off, it is a business that it wants to keep and develop, much like its AltaVista search engine technology. DEC’s Millicent technology was developed at its Palo Alto research labs and announced last March. Since then nothing has been heard. But Russ Jones, VP marketing for the Millicent work was in New York this week for Internet World and to deliver a progress report on the work. Millicent is a suite of pure Java software for consumers, vendors (mostly publishers of some sort or another) and financial middlemen to enable consumer to pay for articles, music and other content in fractions of a cent. The user downloads a Millicent wallet. A vendor then Millicent-enables its content and goes to a ‘broker’ – a trusted financial intermediary, probably a bank, telco or internet service provider – and authorizes that broker to sell a certain amount of its ‘scrip’- code that is equivalent to money. The vendor pays the broker a percentage of everything sold. In essence, the vendors are outsourcing the financial hassle of checking out the consumer, enabling electronic payments form its web site, collecting the money and so on. Consumers will be able to spend their scrip, which they will ‘buy’ using a credit card most likely, at every Millicent-enabled site, but with the added advantage to the consumer of not giving all their demographic information away to every vendor. It is not immediately clear from all this where DEC will make its money. And that’s because it is not too sure itself. It plans to give the wallet and the vendor server away for free, but to charge brokers for the broker server. But it’s undecided whether to do this on an annual license fee, on a franchise basis, or what. DEC says it has a few brokers signed up but is not naming names. A public beta begins December 18 using ‘sample’ money with DEC as the broker, although the company has no plans to become a broker once it’s launched. About two dozen content providers are participating. Jones said the company got as lot of interest from the music business, but there are also companies offering books by the chapter, magazines by the article, and the Oxford University Press is offering lookups to three of its dictionaries at 0.2 cents per-lookup for English and 0.5 cents for an English- German dictionary. The trial will run with fake money until about March or April, when financial transactions will be introduced. There are other applications to the technology as well. Consumers could pay to upload information, for instance for placing classified adverts in newspapers. And users might even be willing to pay to have adverts stripped from the sites they view, although Jones says neither of those are part of the trial. It’s a speculative market, says Jones, there are so many unknowns. The Millicent client wallet runs on Windows 95 and the servers on Windows NT 4.0, although as its all Java there’s no reason why it can’t run on anything and the company is looking to port the server to Unix and the wallet to Macintosh. It initially requires Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer versions 3.0 or higher, though will be backwards compatible when commercially launched. The public beta will be at http://www.millicent.digital.com from Thursday next week.
