Click to transact
Last night I ordered a whole bunch of components to upgrade our main PC and satisfy my wife's Warcraft addiction. Today I got a text message as follows:
There is a problem authorising the payment for your order E123456 . Please ring us on 0870 0123 4567 to resolve this. Thank you for your custom.
Of course, you call the number and have to re-dictate your order code to the agent.
There was also an email with the same message. Now, with a URL, you can add in parameters at the end. Just tag on "?param=value". But the telephone system doesn't understand URLs, and there's no standard way of encoding phone numbers in SMS messages and emails to be able to extend the system just in case you do have a click-to-call capability. (Yes, I know about SIP URIs. The potential is there; a standardised deployed system is not.) There's no way of me pressing the "call" button on my mobile and the order code being passed straight back to their system.
The whole point of VoIP is not arbitrage, price or regulatory bypass. It's doing things you can't do on the set-in-stone circuit networks. The phone companies don't seem to have a vision to sell you anything other than minutes, even if the objective/value/revenue potential of the call is enabling a transaction. What's even scarier is that architectures like IMS are likely to rob the end user of any chance of unilaterally deciding to extend the system. What if I want to participate in some data-exchange that the operator hasn't pre-approved or tariffed in some way? The other part of IP is empowering the user to go out and buy some nifty new talk gadget and have it work without having to worry what their telco, ISP or "IMS-SP" might be compatible with.
In user-to-user Skype calls, we've cracked the exchange of text, URLs, files and desktops. In user-to-business calls, we've made no progress in several decades. This is where I think the opportunity is for Skype and eBay to disrupt telephony the most. Sadly, I think their marketing focus on "free" rather than "better" will come to bite them.
It turned out that the vendor's payment system was down and had automatically spat out the rejection message, and they re-tried and payment went through. At least I got a blog post out of it, for my effort...
Transact with Martin Geddes' Telepocalypse.
