One might have expected a big fuss when Glenn Fleishman, moderator of one of the Internet's most popular mailing lists, announced in April that he was soliciting contributions from list subscribers. After all, free mailing lists are one of the great perks of Net life.
But the list in question was Internet Marketing, and its 4,500 or so subscribers tend to believe that making money in cyberspace is a good thing. Fleishman announced that the preferred means of payment would be through an electronic-transaction scheme devised by First Virtual Holdings Inc.
By June, Fleishman said, he had received only 20 payments. But the response was encouraging enough to prompt First Virtual to talk to Fleishman about developing a model for mailing-list payment methods. Ultimately, he hopes to help create a payment system that would reward list contributors as well as moderators. And the key to the whole enterprise is First Virtual's willingness to create buyer or seller accounts for anyone, no matter how well capitalized.
"It's an enabling thing," says Fleishman. "The credit card companies aren't going to let Joe Down the Street sell merchandise for $10. But anybody can be a seller or a buyer with First Virtual."
First Virtual's system is simplicity itself. Customers and merchants don't have to worry about Pretty Good Privacy keys, secure http, Secure Sockets Layer, or any other cryptographic hoo-ha. Accounts are established offline via phone. To make a purchase, all a customer needs is a First Virtual account number; every transaction is confirmed by the company with follow-up e-mail before credit card processing takes place. The one-time cost to register with First Virtual is $2 for consumers and $10 for retailers. For each transaction, retailers pay a 29-cent fee and 2 percent of the transaction price.
The Net has a tendency to adopt things that work right here, right now, and First Virtual appears to have gained favor. Apple Computer is selling QuickTime software via First Virtual, and First Virtual's Web page (www.infohaus.com) has 145 "storefronts" and many more on the way. In fact, Nathaniel Borenstein, a former computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University who developed the MIME standard for e-mail, claimed that First Virtual was growing at a weekly rate of 15 percent earlier this year.
"If this keeps up," joked Borenstein, "in less than two years, everyone on the planet will have a First Virtual account."
SCANS
Banking with First Virtual
