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Technology Stocks : WAVX Anyone? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: loe4net who wrote (7553)	6/23/1999 9:08:00 AM
From: T. Pog	Respond to of 11417

Excerpt from Briefing.com analysis of CPQ/CMGI deal (regarding Millicent): "Millicent is an existing, fully beta-tested, ecommerce product that allows collection of millicent "credits" by internet merchants on a page view basis. There is no registration or signup for users that have millicent credits. When you view a millicent enabled page, your account is debited, by as little as a thousandth of a penny (hence milli-cent). To the user, Millicent is transparent and completely anonymous. (Think what it would do for pornography sites alone...) At Briefing.com, we have always thought that Compaq was sitting on "two loaded shotguns" in AltaVista and Millicent. We said so in our Stock Brief of July 27, 1998. At the time, we argued that Compaq could turn Millicent into a defacto form of currency on the internet by a simple three step business model: 1.Install a Millicent wallet on every Compaq PC with buying power already installed, perhaps $20 - $50 worth. Sell additional credits by credit card. 2.Distribute Millicent server software free to Internet merchants everywhere. 3.Collect a percentage-of-transaction fee from internet merchants when they "cash in" their Millicent credits. Earn interest on the float between the time Millicent credits are purchased by users, with credit card, and the time that internet merchants cash them in. The potential at Compaq would have been huge, we felt, (especially if Compaq also made AltaVista the default home page for preinstalled browsers.) We even heard later from members of the Millicent team at Digital, that our Stock Brief was presented to Eckhard Pfeiffer, then CEO of Compaq, in an attempt to get Compaq to support the idea. Pfeiffer, we were told, refused to consider it. He's gone now, but he never did much with the Internet except purchase the nearly bankrupt Shopping.com for $200 million. In January, Briefing.com spoke with Russ Jones, manager of the Millicent division (See Stock Brief of January 13, 1999). At that time, he told us that Compaq planned to sell Millicent to a third party who would commercialize the product. No announcement has every been made since that time regarding the Millicent product. In the hands of CMGI, Millicent could instantly become a widely used service on the internet. There are many subscription based services who would like to offer users the ability to view pages for a small fee, without having users commit to subscriptions. Briefing.com would welcome a Millicent solution as a way to allow users to sample Briefing.com on a trial, but paying basis, as well as accommodate occasional users. Hundreds of other sites would also. Currently, no such system exists on the internet." Validates our business model, yes, but nevertheless a threat (albeit a software solution)... tp