PALO ALTO, Calif.—The mobile-commerce industry gained yet another standards body, the PayCircle consortium, which is aimed at creating interfaces that will allow all m-commerce applications to work with various proprietary payment systems and processes. In today’s m-commerce market, the m-commerce applications from most vendors can’t interconnect with those from other vendors, thereby creating a fractured and confusing field.
A variety of standards bodies, including the WAP Forum’s commerce group, the Mobey Forum, MeT and the credit card industry’s Mobile Payment Forum, have been working to sort out these very issues, but each has taken a slightly different approach.
Hewlett-Packard Co., Oracle Corp., Siemens and Sun Microsystems Inc. are the companies behind the PayCircle consortium, which grew out of the Paymentgroup m-commerce open standards effort formed last year by HP and Siemens.
The consortium said it would work to develop application programming interfaces that could work with a variety of proprietary mobile-commerce payment systems, thereby allowing developers to offer their applications throughout the fractured mobile-commerce landscape. The group said security concerns would be handled by built-in systems, such as subscriber identity module cards, and the effort would open up the market for mobile entertainment downloads and real-world applications like paying parking fees.
