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In the blue blaze of the TV klieg lights, I feel a chill as she looks into my eyes and asks seductively: "Are you ready?" I giggle like a schoolboy as we align our handhelds -- hers a Palm, mine a Handspring Visor. The short, young, cute Stephanie Schwab pushes the button and shoots an erotic story into my device's infrared port.
Now you can read eloquent smut anywhere, she assures me, even on the subway. "And no one will know what you are doing," Schwab says. Although I can imagine that people around us might suspect, I keep my mouth shut. After all, I don't usually deal with people from businesses like PalmSex.net (palmsex.net).
That’s right – PalmSex.net, whose unabashed motto is: "Sex right in the palm of your hand." A former PricewaterhouseCoopers consultant, Schwab has teamed up with buddy and schoolteacher Bruce Gordon to enable anyone with a Palm-compatible handheld to download erotic stories from their Web site.
I bumped into Schwab at a business soire mounted by Israeli incubator outfit Yazam in the gleaming new Metropolitan Pavilion on New York City's 18th Street, a stone’s throw from the city's New Media district. De rigeur house music thumped through the speakers high above the young and mindlessly cheerful dot-com crowd. Security hunks decked out with earpieces looked sporty in Italian suits, like a crew of Secret Service men just back from Barney’s, the New York clothier. They wore dark glasses and looked dangerous, just in case any dot-commies got out of control.
QUICK CONNECTION.
Above it all on a makeshift stage was the purported star of the event -- a live filming of the popular venture-capital TV saga Money Hunt -- fought for attention. Most people ignored the spectacle and handed out business cards.
My attention wandered when the words PalmSex.net entered my field of vision, and my eyes strayed to Schwab's name tag. Leaped would be a more accurate. Smitten and curious, I caught her eye. We connected.
She was a sound byte waiting to happen. She told me of her plan -- a subscription service that lets handheld owners download daily doses of dishy fiction. Her partner, a sweetfaced young man with a tiny earring, provides the tales from his erotic literature site. According to Schwab, who's on leave from her consulting gig, 80 to 100 visitors a day are already downloading titilating titles from PalmSex.net -- only three weeks after it launched. The stories so far are mostly penned by pals of Schwab's and Gordon's.
E-ROTIC MODEL.
I inquired about her plans for wireless distribution. She said she was open to anything. Then I popped the question: "How does your mother feel about all this?" Mom supports all her endeavors, she said. And, Schwab is hardly the first young woman to bring sex tales to Net. Genevieve Field at Nerve.com (www.nerve.com) has long sought an audience for the upscale erotica that PalmSex.net hopes to supply. Is there a real market out there? Or at least, maybe an IPO?
Who knows? But at least I felt I had gotten lucky. An entertaining sound byte is hard to find. A fun story even harder. PalmSex.net would provide both. On the subway home, I opened my Handspring and read the story, a potboiler called Riverside. I scanned the first page and deleted the file -- along with fond memories of a pleasantly flirtatious evening.
Salkever is a staff reporter for Business Week Online
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