I listened to an interesting interview with Kurt Huang of BitPass.com over at IT Conversations, part of the Web Talk series with Rob Greenlee. BitPass is a micropayment service, allowing small payments to be deducted from an account in order to pay for online content. Rob discussed the new proposed “BitPass Unplugged” service with Kurt, and while the details were sketchy (since it’s not yet available, looks like end of 2005), it sounded like a really neat application of RSS. Obtaining a subscription-based podcast via an RSS feed will deduct the payment from the user’s BitPass account automatically without any user intervention. If realized, this service could lead the way in allowing the podcasting phenomenon to really grow, since the monetization problem is what is keeping many of the bigger players away right now.
What a neat idea. I hope the final service works out close to how Kurt described it in the podcast.
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[...] I first wrote about Bitpass, a micropayment service, here, back in July of 2005. I was sad to read that the service will shut down as of January 26th. [...]