I am a complete convert. I’m one of the lucky Australian’s who travel to the USA on a reasonably regular basis so I picked up mine in San Francisco a few weeks ago, giving me time now to try the device and explore how it fits into my professional and personal life.

I know we’ve been looking forward to a paperless world since the first personal computers arrived on the scene several decades ago. The opposite is of course the reality – all we’ve done is invent ever increasingly efficient methods to spit yet more reams of dead tree out of ever faster printers and copiers.

Over the past year or two I have been making a concerted effort to reduce the amount of paper on my desk. My adoption of Evernote last year has substantially helped, I now keep all my work notes, documents and other information in this marvellous organiser.

And now with my iPad purchase I’m rallying the paperless troops once more. I’m deliberately not taking a notebook or work papers to meetings. I have everything already in Evernote, and then take notes directly into my iPad during the meeting – which by default has made me the minute taker. Everyone seems quite impressed as I hit the email button at the conclusion of the meeting and send them my notes.

The Australian's iPad app has sold 4,500 copies so far.

I have heard criticism of the iPad keyboard – Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer last week claimed the iPad was “a different form factor PC”. “A guy tried to take notes on one in a meeting with me yesterday – that was fun,” he said. “The meeting didn’t go very fast.”

I’m sorry Steve, you might be vastly richer than I, but you’re just plain wrong. Maybe it’s just a case of being pissed off that Microsoft, despite playing with tablet operating software versions of Windows never truly created a ground-shifting device. Maybe the projected 10 million iPad sales are ramming home to him the missed business opportunity.

My take on the iPad is two-fold:

1. The iPad represents a whole new class of content creation opportunity. It’s easy to use in that particular Apple way (by which I mean, it’s Apple’s way or the highway). There are a myriad of apps already available to help you draw, write, paint, mash up and compose content. Without having to cart around a laptop, and with the 3G service, anywhere at anytime.
2. The iPad represents a whole new class of content delivery opportunity. Oh we’ve done the whole ‘newspapers are dying dinosaurs’ thing, the reality without question is that there will always be printed publications. But the general malaise affecting the old-style news print models will continue as more people choose to source their news and opinion through alternative channels.

The smart publishers are jumping on board the iPad wagon, hoping to ride the coattails. And early mover status probably isn’t a bad thing. It gives you chance to explore models, try variations and consider possibilities whilst the audience is still relatively small, and still learning itself.

I’ve tried a number of ‘news’ apps on my iPad including:

1. The Australian – I think they took a look at the Wall Street Journal when it comes to layout and functionality. But it does the job, signing up was quick and easy, the interface is fine.
2. Wall Street Journal – an ‘early adopter’, they were featured in Steve Jobs’ iPad launch speech earlier this year. Their app is comprehensive and subscription based beyond an initial free period. I find it slightly tedious having to wait for the downloads to occur, but other than that it works well. They’ve sold 10,000 apps on a $US18 a month subscription.
3. Financial Times – it’s a great app, although given their financial markets focus, not so relevant to my daily life. They’ve gone for a similar layout as the WSJ, but with a more fluid scrolling screen, whereas the WSJ (and the Australian) try and contain each page to the dimensions of the iPad screen.
4. Wired Magazine – the leading light, their iPad version of the magazine is a complete delight, audio and video is embedded, the whole magazine layout and content has been re-purposed whilst retaining the distinctive Wire design.
5. BBC – basically a video clip app, allowing you to watch news videos across a range of topics and regions. They don’t update all the time (although you can listen to the BBC world service radio streaming), there are only a few videos in each category. But it’s a slick and effective content delivery mechanism that will improve as they devote more resource to populating the content.

An honourable mention to the Guardian Eyewitness app – not strictly a news application, rather it delivers a single photo each day to your iPad. But what a photo! It’s especially selected as being the particularly thought provoking image of the day from the Guardian’s extensive photo journalism resources.

And a raspberry, well raspberry in waiting anyway, to my home town’s own The Age. I have The Age’s app because it appeared on the app store for a few hours a week or so ago. It’s since disappeared, apparently it was only made available for a short time so the company’s managers and executives could give it a try. I sincerely hope the reason it hasn’t officially been released is because they are working their little geeky butts off completely rewriting the app. It’s woeful. It looks like they simply replicated their iPhone application, right down to the web-based sign up pages. It’s clunky, completely counter-intuitive, and a mess. There, does that make my views plain?

It’s also worth taking a look at some of the RSS feed readers, because several of them aim to mimic the newspaper experience, and a couple do a great job, check out Early Edition or for a lighter, faster experience try Sources.

The iPad represents a brave new world for content creators and consumers. The iPad’s ability to meld a true multi-media experience, in a device that can be used anywhere, combined with its content creation capability, will define a new marketplace, and change others.

Finally, if you were sceptical of the iPad’s ability to do anything, anywhere, I think news that dolphins are using iPads to communicate with humans may force you over from the dark side to see the iPad light.

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I can remember clearly the first time I implemented a credit card payment system online. It was 2000 (lord, 10 years ago) for our internet business Arts Hub. Back then PayPal was in its infancy. No banks in Australia offered a customer facing online credit card system. After a little research I came across a Melbourne-based company called eFirst who had built an interface to the Camtech payment gateway, which these days is called payments.com.au (I still have several clients who use them). To implement a Camtech solution required a fair amount of technical expertise, and I seem to remember, may not even have been available to tiny little businesses like us. The eFirst system required installation of software on our web server, althbough that later changed to become an XML-based system, making life an awful lot easier. But I’ll spare you the geek stuff, this article is intended as a primer for web site businesses, not programmers.

I’ll cluster payment services into three main levels of complexity:

1. Self contained
2. Partial Integration
3. Full integration

Self Contained

The self contained services are complete payment systems, requiring you to do nothing more than add a ‘Buy Now’ button to your web site. They handle all the data and processing, leaving you with the sole task of checking your bank account every so often to check how much moola has been deposited.

PayPal is probably the most well known online payment service in the world, thanks in part to their aquisition by eBay in 2002, which led eventually to being the exclusive payment option on eBay’s auctions.

PayPal’s ‘Buy Now’ button system is simple to implement. You need pretty much zero technical skill, other than knowing how to copy and paste. There’s no complex application process, your credit rating is immaterial and they don’t care if your bank manager won’t return your phone calls.

You place the Buy Now button on your web site, the button code contains a couple of special indentifiers, so when a customer clicks it, they are taken to PayPal’s web site. The customer pumps in their credit card details (or utilises their existing PayPal account), the money is credit to your account and everyone receives notification emails.

The Buy Now button system has been expanded over the years to include the ability to use PayPal as a shopping cart, so customers can add multiple products into a shopping cart and pay for them as a single transaction. There is also a subscription system, so you can charge customers a recurring payment.

The self contained services are dead simple, require no technical expertise, and you’ll be receiving money within hours of going live.

As a comparison to PayPal, have a look at Google Checkout.

Many banks these days also have online payment page systems available to the banks customers. They tend to be simple, but as they are operated by your bank customers presumably tend to regard the transaction as safe.

The self contained services are complete payment systems, requiring you to do nothing more than add a ‘Buy Now’ button to your web site.

Partial Integration

After a while using the self contained systems you discover that you just don’t have enough control over your data – starting with the customer details. What you really want is to maintain a list of your customers on your web site, and record transaction information against their accounts. The most common example of this is online shops – if you sell products online you need to ensure returning customers don’t have to endure the rigmarole of re-registering everytime they purcahse. Plus wouldn’t it be nice if you had access to your customer list for marketing purposes, to send out promotions and offers?

Most off the shelf shopping cart software products provide integration to a variety of online payment services including:

1. PayPal
2. Google Checkout
3. Amazon Payments

All of the shopping process is managed by your software, until the customer clicks to pay and check out. They are transferred to the third party payment system’s web pages, where they make the payment, then they are immediately returned to your web site. So while the customer has seen a web page jump, they do eventually wind up back on your site – for example to see their ‘Thanks for Shopping with us’ message.

1. Behind the scenes the third party system is also transferring data to you. Typically I implement these systems like this:
2. Customer selects product(s) and adds to their shopping cart. The cart is a part of my website’s software
3. The Customer clicks to check out. I capture their user details, or ask them to log in if they are a returning customer
4. I store their details temporarily and jump them off to the third party’s payment page
5. When the customer returns back to my web site I then update my database with their details, information about the transaction and so forth

Full Integration

A full integration is where the customer never leaves your web site to complete the transaction. The customer enters all of their information, including their credit card number into forms on your web pages. Your software interacts with an online payments system behind the scenes to exchange data with the payment gateway. The intent and overall effect is a completely seamless experience for the customer.

Some shopping cart systems offer this kind of full integration, but otherwise it is often achieved via custom written program code. I’ve used a number of these systems, including the PayFlow payment gateway system from Verisign – which now is owned and branded to PayPal.

A key reason why many web sites use self contained or partial integration payment systems is security. Whilst you might be handling some personal details on your web site, you are not touching the actual payment, including the customer’s credit card details. These are requested by, and processed on, the third party’s web site, leaving much of the security issues in the hands of the third party.

This is a huge issue. It is critical that customers have complete confidence in the security of their credit card and payment information. You only need one breach of security to undermine your market’s trust. So we hand off their trust to PayPal, Amazon or Google – brand names customers know well.

If you opt for a full integration, security becomes paramount. You must have a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate, so that the data exchange between the customer’s web browser and your web server is encrypted. These are the web page URLs that start with ‘https’ instead of ‘http’. You also must implement high levels of security in your program code and accompanying hardware systems to mitigate against people hacking into your database and stealing the payment details. There have been many high profile thefts of credit card numbers from some major companies – you must not be one of them. The potential damage to your reputation and business is obvious.

Using services such as PayPal and Amazon to process your payments has a significant upside in addition to security – they look after the merchant account facility you otherwise would need to maintain. Normally a business that wishes to accept credit card payments must open a merchant facility with their bank – usually for Mastercard and Visa. In addition, if you also want to accept Diners and American Express you also have to apply to those companies for an account.

Many credit card companies are still extremely cautious about internet payment transactions, they are concerned about the potentail for fraud and other problems. And so often they require you to lodge a security deposit, each provider has a different equation to calculate the bond amount, but in essence they are seeking to insure themselves against the possibility of a problem arising – for example, fraudulent transactions, or your business going out of business with products or services left unfulfilled.

I remember when we tried to open a merchant facility with Barclays Bank in the UK for Arts Hub many years ago, they asked for a £40,000 bond, an amount that was completely out of the realm of possibility. Instead we signed up with WorldPay, an online payment system that allowed us, as an Australian company, to charge people in the UK in pounds sterling – and also conveniently, Euros. In more recent times I worked with a local company that sells action and adventure experience gift vouchers online. We looked at changing their merchant facility from one bank to another to take advantage of a better online transaction gateway software product, but were thwarted by the new bank’s insistence on a $A250,000 security deposit.

Payment providers such as PayPal and Google make life easy for the online retailer. Their one drawback from my point of view is cost. The convenience they offer comes at a price, through relatively high transaction and merchant fees – and these are expenses you pay.

High volume sites will need to look to the fully integrated, large volume systems such as the PayFlow gateway from PayPal. It will have higher set up and running costs, but you win through lower transaction fees.

What to choose?

So what systems should you choose to accept online credit card payments. Here are my tips:

1. You have a couple of physical products, or you have a content subscription business just launching or early stage.

Go with PayPal. You can open a merchant account with PayPal in ten minutes, copy and paste their Buy Now or Subscribe Now buttons and be selling in no time.

2. You have an electronic product such as an eBook

Go with PayPal but in conjunction with eJunkie. eJunkie handles the shopping cart part of the equation, and the delivery of the digital product. It integrates well with PayPal. I’m not a big fan of the eJunkie management interface, it’s old fashioned and clunky. But it does the job.

3. You have a bunch of physical products to sell, your web site is essentially a shop

Go with a shopping cart system that integrates with one of the main payment gateways such as PayPal, Amazon or Google.

Niche Content Millionaire is a downloadable eBook that tells you the true story how we made millions from subscription content and membership websites. Buy Niche Content Millionaire Now

A copy of David’s speech The Human Face of Technology has been kindly made available to Into the Mountain, courtesy of Tim Roberts and ARTS. The full version is available here.

The 6th Annual NARPACA Ticketing Professionals Conference was organised by Tim Roberts founder of ARTS and for more information on the recent 2010 conference visit www.ticketingprofessionals.com.au

David Eedle enjoys giving speeches on technology, social media and how business can harness the new to reinvigorate and bring new possibilities to what they’re doing. If you would like to book David to speak at your event or conference please contact info@intothemountain.com

Niche Content Millionaire is a downloadable eBook that tells you the true story how we made millions from subscription content and membership websites. Buy Niche Content Millionaire Now