It comes down to trust, says Jeremy Kagan, CEO of Israeli startup eBiz Mobility; if everyone just trusted each other, the wheels of international commerce would get greased, and billions of people would spend trillions of dollars on great on-line services. How’s that for a recession-buster?

Alas, trust is hard to come by – and for good reason. We live in a cold, cold world – a world where you have to “put up or shut up.” If you don’t have someone trustworthy vouching for you, your money’s no good on-line – literally. And for those who don’t have a credit card or other internationally recognized means of payment, “on line shopping” means waiting in a queue at their local supermarket. For many merchants, you’re nobody if you don’t have a credit card; if you didn’t have the “juice” to get one out of your bank, you obviously can’t be trusted!

But those financial non-entities – the “unbanked,” in current business parlance – make up a mighty population. Forget about the third world; in the U.S. itself, 40% of people who regularly surf the web don’t have credit card – (one study shows that as many 80 million don’t even have bank accounts!). Outside the U.S., the situation is even more dire; even in some advanced countries, as many as 90% of those who surf the web regularly don’t have credit cards.

It’s a “dire” situation, all right – both for the surfers, who are forced to ogle internet goodies, like downloads, music, ringtones, and all sorts of other stuff they can easily pay for, but can’t because they don’t have an easy way to pay for them. And it’s certainly dire for the merchants, who could be doubling, tripling or quadrupling their business, with access to the Great Unbanked. Even more dire for web merchants is the “dropout rate”; 60% of people who seem ready to make a web purchase abandon their shopping cart before the transaction is completed! “At least some of these are people who were going to buy but realized they had payment issues,” says Kagan.

It’s these people – those who are excluded from the wonderful world of web shopping because of trust issues, but really would make good customers – that Kagan’s company seeks to help. Ebiz has developed a payment clearing system that enables merchants to feel secure that they will get paid, without having to pay expensive premiums to billing service providers; it enables sites or cellphone service providers to grab a piece of the business that passes through their network; and it allows hundreds of millions of web surfers who would otherwise be locked out of internet commerce the opportunity to purchase digital content and products that will make their lives easier and happier!

Just who are these “unbanked?” Among web surfers, of course, many are teenagers – too young to qualify for credit cards, but old enough to have cellphones. Many of them already download content from their service provider and the latter’s partners; Kagan’s system allows even smaller merchants to join that golden circle and reach the service provider’s customers. Another large group of the unbanked consist of foreign workers, who are living and earning money in western countries, but don’t even have a bank account. Some don’t even have cellphones, but they do surf the web, and they have money; for them, eBiz can enable purchases via virtual credit cards or credits at their ISPs.

Merchants that enroll in the company’s OneTouch payment program get access to billing deals eBiz has worked out with various service providers or credit organizations. Among those are cell phone service providers, for example; a purchase by a customer at a web site that accepts OneTouch will be able to pay with their cell phone account, with the charge just added on to their bill at the end of the month. But eBiz offers merchants other methods of collecting payment. The company just signed a deal with Ukash, a prepaid credit card that UK customers can buy and use on-line. And merchants can even enroll in credit programs offered by ISPs or telcos, where customer purchases are added to those bills as well.

So why can’t merchants join programs like these on their own? They can, says Kagan, but it just wouldn’t be worth their while. “As all cellphone users know, you can purchase all sorts of services and downloads via SMS. But third party merchants find that solution very expensive, because service providers charge a high premium for each message, not to mention disputes and fines on the amount that was sold, among other issues. The same holds true for credit card commissions and penalties. If you’re selling a download for a dollar or two, it just doesn’t pay.” The same goes for service providers; due to limited resources, they can only work with partners they know and trust, leaving “off-portal” and small merchants out of the loop. But they will work with eBiz, who vouches for the merchants enrolled in OneTouch to the “big guys.” It’s a beautiful relationship all around!

With OneTouch, Kagan says, even small merchants can take advantage of online payments, because it’s eBiz that’s handling the transaction with the service provider. Meanwhile, the merchant is assured that the customer will pay, since the payment is being collected by the service provider – and the merchant gets a check from eBiz. The service can even help customers who have credit cards; businesses that offer OneTouch can be assumed to be legitimate, since they are approved by the service provider and eBiz. So there’s no need to fear on-line fraud or phishing at a site that accepts OneTouch. Trust is important, says Kagan – and offering merchants, service providers, and web surfers the ability to connect with, do business with – and yes, trust – each other is what eBiz Mobility is all about.

Related articles by Zemanta

• PesaPal: Kenyan Web & Mobile Payments (whiteafrican.com)
• Finovate: The Quest for User-Friendly Cellphone Banking (blogs.wsj.com)
• Mobile phones becoming our ‘remote controls for life’…we even take them to bed with us (thisisherd.com)
• Central Bank of India Debuts Gift and Virtual Cards to Ease Holiday Gifting (pindebit.blogspot.com)

Hi-tech isn’t just about esoteric databases and developing trailblazer technologies. At the bottom line, it’s really all about the bottom line: Making money.

Case in point: The TV weather person. While we all turn on the TV news once a day or so because it’s what informed people do, we all know in advance what to expect: War, tragedy, greed, scandal, etc. Same old, same old. We could be watching last year’s edition, for the depth of variety and innovation.

That’s why they put the “expanded forecast” with the maps and the “personality” on last; the TV executives know why you’re watching, and they want you to keep it on for as long as the broadcast lasts in order to boost the ratings. The weather, unlike the “hard” news items, contains an element of surprise, and appeals to our sense of trying to control the future; the weather person is like a fortune teller, predicting what will happen in the next three to five days. The better the prediction, the more “control” the prophet has over upcoming events.

Or something like that.

Bottom line: The more accurate the forecast, the more people will be drawn to watch the news, and the more bragging rights the station/forecaster will have, which can be used to attract even more viewers, thereby generating higher ratings and more cash per advertising minute on the broadcast.

So: Far from being a stodgy science with a funny name – “meteorology” – weather forecasting is about dollars, cents and shekels, and it shouldn’t at all be surprising that hi-tech companies would throw their computerized heart and soul into developing ways to use programming and processing to better predict the weather.

Successful weather prediction is a function of two things, says Dr. Barry Lynn, of Weather-It-Is - processing power, and an accurate forecasting model. Dr. Lynn (he’s a doctor of meteorology, in fact) has a forecasting model that he prefers to work with – the Weather Research and Forecasting Model – the processing power to break down weather forecasting for areas as small as 10 kilometer square (i.e., specific forecasts for small areas), and his own programmed algorithms for predicting accurately – more accurately than most – exactly what the weather is going “to do,” as most of us put it.

And it’s not just about providing TV newscasts with higher ratings; improved and more accurate weather prediction could be a boon for many industries that need to wrestle the environmental elements in order to get work done. Take an electric company crew that needs to do major line work, for example. These guys get paid a huge hunk of change for field work, and if the company sends them out on a job, while they sit in the truck instead of working because a surprise electrical storm has made it too dangerous to work, the company – and, of course, its customers – end up footing that bill. An accurate weather prediction for the specific area in question is valuable information for the utility, says Dr. Lynn, and they’ll pay – as will oil and gas drillers, farmers, airports and a host of other industries and services.

But surely major weather prediction services have already seen this market and taken advantage of advanced technology to come up with more accurate models. Not necessarily, says Dr. Lynn, and certainly not everywhere. Among the problems is that many of the weather services (at least outside the US) are tied to government or educational institutions, and we all know how they can be about changing their methods and/or approaches to solving problems. Much of the prediction algorithms in use are built on less accurate (i.e. more primitive) models, and rewriting them would of course entail a lot of time and money. And the better commercial ventures that do exist serve only the “top” markets in the US and Europe – and charge a hefty fee for their services. Wide swaths of the world, including much of Asia and the Middle East, and all of Africa, are not covered by any advanced service.

And often, it’s these developing countries, especially in Africa, that could truly benefit from enhance weather prediction.

Closer to home, some experts charge that the Israel Meteorological Service bases its forecasts on an inaccurate model and last-generation software.

“It’s not really their fault,” Dr. Lynn says, “because their budget is so small, they can’t afford new equipment.”

Nevertheless, he said, the IMS charges a lot of money for their so-so service – while his predictions have more often than not been much more accurate.

Case in point: The threatened snowstorm that eventually did hit Jerusalem in January. Having a vested interest in knowing what to expect, since I was scheduled to drive into and out of the city on storm day, I followed the detailed forecast on Israel Radio closely. As Dr. Lynn reminded me, and as indeed I noticed myself, the weather service changed its forecast at least three times in the days preceding the storm, first predicting a sizable (for Jerusalem) layer of snow on the ground, then backing off altogether, saying the storm would bring no more than freezing rain, and then, in the immediate hours before the storm, a prediction that snow would indeed fall and that there would be a modest accumulation – the prediction, Dr. Lynn said, that he had already made on his Web site days before the storm hit.

So, there’s plenty of opportunity close to home – as well as in neighboring countries, including Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan, which have almost no weather forecasting services to speak of. Dr. Lynn’s site has city by city and region by region breakdowns for all these countries, as well as, of course, for Israel, and the forecast for each area analyzes in depth the available information and produces a unique prediction for what residents of each specific city can expect – unlike the IMS, which produces forecasts by wide regions. But even though they are both in the North, Safed and Haifa have radically different weather – even Haifa and Carmiel can often expect different conditions. Dr. Lynn’s site takes into account these differences and produces a what he says is a more accurate forecast for these and dozens of other localities in Israel and the rest of the Middle East.

The fledgling company is expanding, and hopes to be able to implement 10 kilometer area predictions in the very near future (after they acquire some more processing power). Dr. Lynn said that his company had worked out a deal to supply information to a forecasting company called Nooly, and that Channel 10’s weather “personality,” Danny Rupp, will use the company’s data in upcoming forecasts.

Meanwhile, you can check out what Dr. Lynn predicts at his site, http://www.weather-it-is-israel.com, for your town – and maybe soon, for your street!

Related articles by Zemanta

• And now for the weather… (carminesuperiore.blogspot.com)
• Wacky weather leaves forecasters explaining (ctv.ca)