Today sees the launch of Meritora, the first commercial implementation of the universal payment standard PaySwarm (initially discussed in this blog here and here). The creation of Digital Bazaar, the company founded and CEO’d by Manu Sporny – whose W3C credentials include being founder of both the Web Payments Community Group and JSON-LD Community Group, as well as chair of the RDF Web Applications Working Group – Meritora is designed to ease what is still a surprisingly arduous task of buying and selling on the web. The service is starting with a simple asset hosting feature for helping vendors sell digital content on WordPress-powered sites, and support for decentralized web app stores so that app creators can put their work on their web sites, set a price for them, and let them be bought there, at a web app store, or anywhere on the web.

The name Meritora points to the service’s underlying purpose of rewarding greatness, coming from the bases ‘merit’ and ‘ora,’ the latter of which has been used across a number of cultures to express a unit of value, Sporny says (noting that it means ‘golden’ in Esperanto, and was also used as a unit of currency among Anglo-Saxons). That’s a big name to live up to, but the service hopes to do so by making Web payments work simply, securely, quickly, with low fees and no vendor lock-in for buyers and sellers on the digital content scene.

There’s Linked Data to thank for what Meritora, and PaySwarm, can do, with Sporny describing the system as “the world’s first payment solution where the core of the technology is powered by Linked Data.”

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Yesterday, we ran Part I of our conversation with Manu Sporny, CEO of Digital Bazaar, about Payswarm, a new type of micropayment standard for the web. Today, we dive a bit deeper into the process of how Payswarm is being developed as a Semantic Web based standard rather than a proprietary technology.

SW: Tell us a bit about the choice to create PaySwarm as a standards project.
MS: The answer lies somewhere in a lack of open, patent- and royalty-free standards for online payments. Filling out your credit card information on every site you want to support is not the answer. Neither is signing up to a proprietary payment service. What we need are open standards for payment on the Web – once that is in place, we can look forward to an explosion in innovative start-ups centered around finance and crowd-sourced funding. We can also look forward to more individuals being enabled to make a living via the Web which, given this incredibly deep recession, will have a very positive impact on a number of people’s lives.

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Manu Sporny, Founder/CEO of Digital Bazaar, Inc., sat down with SemanticWeb.com to discuss Payswarm, a new standard that he is working on through a W3C Community Group. This article is Part 1 of 2.

SemanticWeb.com: What is PaySwarm?
Manu Sporny: It is a universal payment standard designed specifically for the Web. Think “an open source PayPal on steroids” – an open, patent and royalty free specification for Web Payments. The goal of PaySwarm is to make crowd-funding, world-changing ideas, buying and selling online as easy as sending an e-mail or an instant message. We want payment to be baked into the core of the Web so that exciting new companies can be launched on top of this truly open payment platform.

We want to enable anybody in the world to launch a PayPal, KickStarter, or Kiva. Think of what the Web did for companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo. We think PaySwarm can do that for the next generation of start-ups that want to transform the way we reward each other on the Web. Improving the way we organize financial resources to enhance our personal lives and pursue endeavors that improve upon the human condition is at the core of what we’re doing.
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