Abstract: There is provided a method and system of processing electronic transactions involving three parties, normally remote from one another. A service requestor(SR) requests a good or service from a service provider(SP) on the condition that certain terms will be fulfilled indicating that the good or service is provided at a particular standard. The service provider registers with a reputation authority terms for the supply of a good or service. Independently the service requestor acquires from the reputation authority a public key for which the private key is kept by the reputation authority. The service requestor(30) requests the service provider(20) for a good or service according to certain terms and the request is sent to the reputation authority which compares registered terms with the requested terms and if compatible signs the transaction with the retained private key and sends the signed transaction back to the service requestor.

Abstract: A known micro-payment system suffers from a problem of needing increasing network bandwidth as the granularity of the micro-payment decreases, thus increasing the latency of the processing of each micro-payment. The present system seeks to address this problem. There is disclosed a method, performed in an interactive client server system, of charging micro-payments to a third party billing server on behalf of a user using the interactive client server system, said method comprising the steps of: requesting a billing authorization from a user of the interactive client server system; receiving an authorization including an address of a billing server (e.g. from a smart card); sending an authorization message to the billing server. The billing server determines from the authorization whether the user has a valid account at the billing server. A micro-payment value may be determined from the authorization.

Abstract: The invention relates to an application adapted to run on a client apparatus connectable with a server across a network. The server is adapted to simultaneously share information (ideas) maintained therein with a plurality of heterogeneous clients. The application is able to retrieve ideas from the server and to define new ideas in a manner dependent on the client apparatus platform. The newly defined ideas can then be transmitted to the server for maintenance in a platform-independent manner. At the client, the information is rendered appropriately for that client.