Word: beenz
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...Admittedly, the Internet is littered with failed micropayment companies. If you remember Flooz, Beenz, CyberCash, Bitpass, Peppercoin and DigiCash, it's probably because you lost money investing in them. Many tracts and blog entries have been written about how the concept can't work because of bad tech or mental transaction costs...
Here's how beenz work. First, you open a free account with Beenz.com a New York City-based outfit that's been in business since 1998. You then earn beenz by visiting certain websites that give beenz away as a means of rewarding customer loyalty, in exchange for personal information or as a reward to surfers for just showing up. Hence the name--"You get something just for having 'been' there," explains Beenz.com chairman and CEO Philip Letts. Among the sites that offer this virtual token of their esteem are Excite UK, Dash, FortuneCity and the Motley Fool. Then, once...
...beenz is now a global operation, with offices from New York City to Stockholm to Sydney to Hong Kong. And it's getting to be a significant business: in November the company completed its third round of venture-capital fund raising, bringing total investment in the start-up to almost $40 million; its technology partners include such heavy hitters as Oracle, Sun Microsystems and Web-hosting giant Exodus. There are almost 750 million beenz in circulation--roughly equivalent to the currency float of a small country...
...fledgling Web currency still has a long way to go. No major e-commerce site has signed on yet, though Letts says that will change. "We are engaging with most of the Top 10 players," he says. "We have verbal agreements with a couple of them." beenz also faces serious competition. There are dozens of other Web-based customer-incentive programs out there, including ClickRewards, which distributes frequent-flyer miles. There are also competing micropayment schemes in the works, like Trivnet, which automatically lumps your e-commerce bill into your phone or Internet-service-provider bill on a monthly basis...
...count beenz out. No other company combines customer rewards with micropayments in quite the way Beenz.com does, and no other company is aiming quite so high. Before the year is out, Letts plans to distribute beenz on cell phones and on MasterCard-backed Mondex smart cards. Beenz.com recently logged its 15 millionth beenz transaction, and Letts predicts--"without a shadow of a doubt"--that this year the company will sign up its 5 millionth customer. By then, who knows how much a hill of beenz might be worth...