The Problem:
Most people use a LOT of services, many of them infrequently, and many for the first and only time. Going through the hassle of entering the same name, address, phone number, credit card, and so on is tedious and really unnecessary, That information is also usually very poorly maintained. If you move, change phone numbers, change ISPs, change your name by getting married, change credit cards, etc. the information you entered in those countless sites becones stale and requires changing. Alas, most people can't even remember all of the places they have registered and it's just a mess, Here's how things work today,,,
First, you arrive at the florist.com site...
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After browsing to the particular product you want to purchase, there's a lengthy ordering process that goes something like this:
Step A: Enter a name, address, phone number, and inscription...
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Step B: Next, enter billing information about c redit cards and such...
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Step C: Confirm that everything is all OK...
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Step D: Receive confirmation that the order is complete.
The AuthentiKey Way
Rather than having to enter identification and payment information for each site and for each purchase, all one should have to do is something similar to what we see in the Amazon.com "one click" purchase. This means that the navigation clutter of the above scenario can be removed, and it can all boil down to a single confirmation step alike this:
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Behind the scenes, the site can detect (via a cokie) that the browser is configured for AuthentiKey, and can verify who the user is (this assumes that the user has previously confirmed that information should be released to Florist.com...if not he can just be prompted for that permission by the site or the AuthentiKey client), and the order can be completed after a confirmation that the order wasn't an accident. The site can even interrogate the user information made available by AuthentiKey in order to discover things like available payment methods (if the user has registered several credit cards and other things like PayPal, the options can be presented for the user to choose). The site can also detect that the user has alternate messaging interfaces such as instant messaging or a pager which can be used to confirm that the order has been shiped. This kind of thing isn't possible today because there's no uniformity of registration, naming, and usage for these services and therefore configuring the service to use them each time would become unbearably complex.