When we started Transcepta, my co-founder Ray Parsons and I talked alot about the “name-space problem” and how much it has set back our attempts around the world to move to paperless B2B eCommerce. This problem goes something like this:

• The accounting system of a buyer has a purchase order, ready to send to one of their suppliers. Unless they have pre-established EDI relationships with that supplier, they probably mail or fax the PO. Larger buyers almost always have the ability to send the PO to the supplier in electronic form (i.e. XML), but if they did, the supplier couldn’t read it. Why? You guessed it: the namespace problem. The buyer orders part number AD7823, but the supplier knows it as something else. Note that name-space problems aren’t just for part numbers; they also apply to simple fields like company name, address, PO number etc.
• Now the supplier receives this PO,

…

Have you noticed that the U.S. is a nation of contradictions? This country came up with electricity, the silicon chip, the personal computer, Amazon.com, the iPod, Google, and reality TV (OK, so that’s a bad example). We have very active capital markets. We launch businesses and have active venture capital to fund them. We have entrepreneurs everywhere.

And yet when it comes to financial transactions, we are in the dark ages. Take, for example, the use of debit cards. They are just starting to be prominent in the U.S. But I’ve spent a fair amount of time in Europe, and the dominance of debit cards and “smart cards” that keep account details on the card and ensure authentication - they’re everywhere! In fact, they were everywhere 5 years ago.

For B2B transactions, well, the situation is even worse than with B2C transactions. …

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