If you don't have a beenz in your virtual pocket, maybe you should. beenz (the trademarked word is both singular and plural) are a new kind of money that circulates exclusively on the Internet. There are no beenz coins or beenz bills. The only place you can earn beenz is on the Web, and the Web is the only place you can spend them. beenz are the product of a company called Beenz.com that hopes to make them the currency of the Internet, and they may be the future of cash as we know it. In five years, says Beenz.com founder Charles Cohen, "I believe we'll start to see beenz listed against other major currencies."
Well, maybe. beenz aren't a currency in the strictest sense. You can't go to the bank and trade dollars for beenz, for example, nor will Beenz.com allow you to transfer your trove of beenz to someone else. But beenz are one of the more successful attempts to solve a problem that's as old as the Web, that of finding an easy and safe way for people to spend money online in small amounts. "Right now there isn't really a viable way for consumers to pay for something that costs 50[cents], because that's about how much a credit-card transaction costs the merchant," says Ken Cassar, an analyst with the e-commerce research firm Jupiter Communications. "It's just not economical for online merchants to sell things that cost less than $10 or $20." Early attempts to create a practical alternative to credit cards for conducting financial transactions online have been slow to gain consumer confidence. One such initiative, DigiCash, filed for bankruptcy in 1998, and others have just given up.
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 your virtual wallet is bulging, you can spend beenz at any of some 200 e-commerce sites that accept beenz as a form of payment, including Flooz, ishop, Jellybeenz Gifts and MP3.com There are no downloads or credit-card transactions, and Beenz.com keeps track of your account for you. No muss, no fuss.
Cohen founded Beenz.com because he was fed up with existing customer-incentive programs. "I had reward cards and loyalty-card and bank schemes, miles for this, miles for that, thousands and thousands of points, but I had no idea what they were worth. They sent me catalogs, and I didn't want anything in them. It was annoying." He saw an opportunity to give consumers more of a choice in how companies rewarded them for purchases, and to grease the wheels of the burgeoning Internet economy, all in one swoop. Beenz.com launched in March 1999, and by August 150 companies were signed up to accept the new tokens.