Bill Gates talked about a new system that is coming offer not online another online payment system such as PayPal and Google Checkout, but it will also give the ability for Micropayments!

First, the system is going to allow for online commerce without credit card fees.  Just wait until that starts eating into the Visa & Mastercard revenues!  I see court battles ahead...

The most interesting part to me is the ability of micropayments, which many of us have been waiting years to come to light.  Microsoft has may have just the power to bring this to fruition!

What are micropayments?  Well, it is the abilty to charge small fees for products or services, such as small as a dime or even less.  In today's world, processing fees can cost as much as $0.25 minimum making small purchase impossible.  With micropayments it is not only possible, but can be quite profitable!

There is a vast array of avenues businesses can reap great revenue from micropayments.  Think of how much content is given away for free to website visitors simple to try generating advertisement revenue.  Now you will be able to charge a couple pennies here and there for your content and if it is popular content, bring in much more than you could have ever earned with advertisements.

Not only will it make a different to businesses, but it can help to change people's views to accepting fee based systems.  Not a lot of people want to spend several dollars online for content, but an article that costs them a few pennies to read, may just drag them in the door. 

Anyway, here is the article I spotted today:

http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/ articles/djf500/200701271224DOWJONESDJONLINE000323_ FORTUNE5.htm

 Some are suggesting the structure will be a point based where you purchase so many points and when your make purchases, those are in points.  Personally, I think this is the best way to handle online transactions for many reasons, but most importantly, you can break up the value down to to a fraction of a cent if you so wished. 

One thing I have found from point systems is that people do not quantify what they are spending as they have no real world value in points.  That is, if a person looks and the charge is 200 points, that does not sound like anything if they have 20,000 points available.  They do not seem to think that those 2,000 points cost them $20, but if you had the price listed as $2.00 on the same purchase many people may not make the purchase having a value to which they can relate.

This is one reason I plan to use a point system in my OurLocalArea.com site which will get a major upgrade this year.

Here is a link to a blog talking about the possible point system:

http://www.windows-now.com/blogs/robert /archive/2007/01/28/microsoft-to-open- points-micro-payment-framework.aspx