Did anyone read a small Wall Street Journal article yesterday (Monday) on page B10? No mention of Novell, but here's a hand typed excerpt for y'all to comment on. It seems to be right in the DigitalMe alley.
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Companies Agree On Single Standard For Online Wallet
By Nick Wingfield
Some of the Internet's fiercest competitors have agreed upon a single standard for electronic wallets, a software technology designed to simplify purchases for online shoppers.
Microsoft Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc., American Online Inc., and International Business machines Corp., along with credit-card giants Visa International Inc. and MasterCard International Inc., today will endorse a new technical format called ECML, or electronic-commerce modeling language.
Dell Computer Corp., Hollywood Entertainment Corp.'s Reel.com subsidiary, Beyond.com Corp., and Nordstron Inc. are among the online merchants pledging to use ECML to accept credit-card payments.
ECML is designed to give Web merchants a way to accept credit-card payments from consumers without requiring them to re-enter their personal information during every transaction. Software firms, for their part, will use ECML to store payment data in a shopper's Web Browser or on a server on the Internet.
(skipped 2 paragraphs to last one here)
The cooperation of Microsoft, Sun and AOL shows how much importance the companies are placing on wallet technology as a catalyst for electronic commerce. Earlier this year a report by Jupiter Communications LLC, a New York research firm, showed that 27% of Internet shoppers abandon their orders before checkout because of the hassle of filling out forms with credit-card numbers and other data. "Whether we're competitors or not, this gives us all a bigger pie," said Blake Irving, general manager of Microsoft's consumer-commerce group.
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Does this have DigitalMe written all over it or what? Where is Novell? Regards, QuadK |
