CANARIE Proposal

A proposal recently submitted by ACT to CANARIE’s 1998 funding program has passed the first stage of approval and is now on the short list. Final word on whether the project will be accepted depends on the development of a full business plan and a decision is expected in early May.

This proposal, submitted to the Technology and Application Development program, will fund further development of the NetXchequer Authentication and Billing System.

A key concept of the NetXchequer system is "micro-billing" or the ability to account for numbers of small transactions that may come from a variety of sources. For example, suppose someone has created a web site on which are available, on a pay-per-view basis, a number of images. These images come from a variety of sources. The cost of viewing each image is quite small, but the revenue generated has to be shared among the owner of the web-site, the provider of the image, and perhaps the original owner of the image. The amounts of money associated with individual images may be tiny but the NetXchequer system will handle the accounting, accumulation, and distribution of revenues to all parties.

The purpose of this project is to investigate a number of business issues relating to NetXchequer and Internet commerce, including such things as:

Billing Model
Taxation
Regional pricing
Personalized services
Use of promotional incentives such as discounts, sales, etc.
Financial compensation for the use of intellectual property
Reliability and speed of transactions
Interactive interfaces to conventional banking systems

Based on the results of this project, the NetXchequer server will be modified and extended to deal with transaction-based activities.