Leading Edge R&D:

ACCENTURE LAB WORKS ON 'OBJECT-TO-OBJECT' INTERNET COMMERCE

As reported by Jat Gill, Making sure that your office chair is adjusted to the height of your desk could be the least of your worries when you perch on the prototype created by management consultants Accenture.

The chair's built-in sensors record how long you spend sitting in it. But the seat is not part of a grand plan to help bosses identify their laziest workers. Instead, says Accenture, it is a demonstration of a pay-per-use pricing model of which we are set to see much more.

Nestling in a hillside half an hour's drive from Nice, in southern France, Accenture's Sophia Antipolis technology lab, which dreams up business applications for emerging technologies, is awash with what the company calls "silent commerce".

By putting sensors and radio tags inside mundane, everyday objects, they will be able to communicate with each other and even carry out transactions, according to Accenture's vision.

"It is a very realistic possibility that within five years the majority of Internet transactions will be between objects rather than people," predicts James Hall, Accenture's managing partner for technology business solutions.

He says that falling prices for radio tags will come together with a growth in infrastructure for micropayments -- transactions that amount to fractions of a pence, to allow pay-per-use charging to take off. The model could work for everything from office furniture rental to car insurance.

"We believe that technology is allowing people to move from selling products to selling services. With that will come a greater ability for people to pay for things as they use them, rather than paying upfront. Or maybe they will pay for something upfront and then pay more based on the use that they make of it," Hall says.

"To give an example, one of the things we are talking about is paying for car insurance by the mile, or by the mile per hour. If I had a device in my car that communicated where I was, and how far I was moving, it could fire off a transaction to the insurance company every few minutes. The value of those transactions individually would be tiny, of course, but they would add up over a period of time."

Among gadgets developed by the lab is what could be the world's most advanced Barbie doll. The "autonomous purchasing object," as Accenture calls it, can choose and buy its own outfits, by matching preferences programmed in by its owner with descriptions stored on inexpensive radio tags sewn into the items of clothing.

But this is not the latest in must-have toys this Christmas. Once again, the Barbie is just a platform to show off the concept. Autonomous purchasing could be used to let industrial machines order their own spare parts when needed, Accenture says. Intelligent stock rooms could reorder goods to maintain a given supply level. The company has also developed a working autonomous system for refillable gas canisters.

Hall is not worried about people's possible reluctance to give objects the authority to spend money. "When direct debits first started to come into general use there were a lot of people worried that the uptake would be slow because perhaps they were losing control. But pretty quickly the additional convenience and the financial incentives that people offered rapidly overcame those concerns. I think the same will be here," he says.

While applications for the Bluetooth wireless communication standard have been slow to appear, Accenture has used the technology to update an existing idea -- the mobile phone-operated vending machine.

In Accenture's prototype, the machine connects to your mobile phone using Bluetooth as you walk by, sending you a menu of items. When you select a product, the machine then connects over the Internet to a micropayment provider with which you have an account. The transaction is authorized and completed after you enter a Pin code and the machine dispenses your choice.

By using a combination of Bluetooth and the Internet, the mobile phone network is completely avoided and there is no charge to your phone bill. Accenture says the idea could allow electronic payment for many types of products -- from use at petrol pumps, to parking meters, for example.

Hall, who is a member of the CBI's economic affairs committee and who was previously a member of the influential Institute for Public Policy Research's Commission on Public Policy & British Business, underlines the role of government in promoting the use of technology. Hall says government is well-placed to provide the underpinnings of a security infrastructure, using digital certificates and electronic signatures, for example.

"In the non-electronic world, government has already assumed responsibility for vouching for its citizens. That is what a passport is -- it vouches for who you are. It is clear that as we move more and more to an electronic world, we have the requirement for some general mechanism for vouching who you are," he says.

"It is impractical to envisage every corporation having to do that individually -- and extremely inefficient were they to try. Just as there are core parts of a physical infrastructure, like a road system, that you reasonably look to the government to provide, even if they actually outsource the provision of it to the private sector, then I think we should look to the government to provide that sort of electronic certification so that citizens have an electronic passport."

Hall says he is concerned that the UK is "in danger of moving from leader to laggard" over issues such as local-loop unbundling that are holding up the roll-out of broadband services, but stops short of laying the blame with a single agency.

He also says that information technology is about more than just realizing gains in productivity. Businesses should look to technology to give them additional capabilities. "You have to separate productivity from capability and the real issue is what capability is IT delivering to organizations to allow them to do things they could never have done before," he adds.