From Herb Greenberg's column this a.m."
Short Positions
CustomTracks, update: Expect to see the shorts and longs step up their battle over CustomTracks (CUST:Nasdaq) today. The Texas company, no stranger to this column, has been attracting investors on the belief that it is about to unleash something (nobody has been sure quite what) on the Internet.
Late yesterday the company gave a clue when it said it received U.S. approval for a new, unusually secure encryption technology from the U.S. government. The key part of the announcement, I am told, is the sentence in the press release that says the technology will allow Internet users "worldwide to send and receive encrypted and digitally signed email communications without changing their existing email addresses or their existing email systems."
Simply put, you would be able to send totally secure emails from any email address within any network to any other email address anywhere -- something that isn't currently easy to do.
If true, that's a big deal. "If this product is simple to use, transparent to users, inexpensive and easily installed or downloaded, the market opportunity is enormous," says Joe Barton of White Rock Capital, which owns about 9% of the company. (He thinks it will be.)
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