[118248] in Cypherpunks
New company: SmartCash
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Robert Hettinga)
Wed Sep 22 19:49:46 1999
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Date: Wed, 22 Sep 1999 19:29:22 -0400
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From: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>
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Date: Wed, 22 Sep 1999 15:50:20 -0700
To: dbs@philodox.com
From: John Muller <johnmuller@earthlink.net>
Subject: New company: SmartCash
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>From the Industry Standard. The full story is at
http://www.thestandard.net/articles/display/0,1449,6483,00.html?home.bf.
According to whois, the administrative contact for SpendCash.com is Yiannis
Tsiounis, so that's a good start.
E-commerce for Debtors
By Kenneth Li
Paranoid and credit-strapped Web shoppers take heart: SpendCash.com is
hoping to provide a cheap and easy entree into the myriad wonders of
e-commerce.
Taking a cue from the $1-billion-plus market in prepaid phone cards, New
York-based SpendCash is preparing to launch an e-commerce card that
consumers can chuck after spending.
But the company faces stiff competition from other online-currency gambits,
as well as from credit card giants like American Express (AXP) . The latter
company announced its Blue smart card earlier this month, which is aimed at
online shoppers skittish over privacy and piracy concerns.
SpendCash executives, though, are confident their InternetCash card is
sufficiently distinct from that it will prevail. "American Express is not
reaching down to the man and woman on the street," says Spendcash.com CEO
Charles Doherty. "[InternetCash] is for people who are cash spenders."
The cards will work like this: First, customers will buy the cards in $5,
$10, $20, $50 and $100 denominations at participating retailers. (Doherty
promises as many as 10,000 retail locations, though he declines to name
any.) Next, consumers must go either to the participating Web sites or to
SpendCash's site to activate their card and select a personal
identification number. Only then will consumers be able to shop at the list
of as-yet-unannounced participating online retailers. SpendCash will get a
2.25 percent cut of every sale. For downloadable products such as music and
video, that cut can rise to 10 percent or more.
Doherty says his method offers consumers a layer of privacy that has so far
kept skeptics offline. And downloaded material, he notes, won't even
require a delivery address. A beta test of the InternetCash cards is
scheduled for Oct. 1 in both Dallas and New York. The service is slated to
launch nationwide in November.
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Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
