Seriosity tries to solve email spam — with virtual currency

We’ll call Seriosity the quirky company of the year.

The three-year old Palo Alto, Calif. company has been secretive, but now it has launched a new way for corporate employees to manage their email load.

It gives the employees a set amount of virtual currency, called Serio, and they have to spend it order to send email. The more they judge an email to be important, the more currency they use to send it, so that recipients are alerted to its value. Senders will spend zero if the email isn’t important at all. The recipient gets to keep the currency, adding it to their existing stash to send emails.

The idea is that the scarcity of currency will help instill the need to be efficient when sending email. This is somewhat odd, however, because it assumes we marshal our resources efficiently, and we’re not convinced this is the case. How do we know if a banal “cc” email is something the recipient doesn’t really want to see? How much time are we going to spend pondering whether to give 4 or 5 serios? This may slow us down, not speed us up, as it is supposed to do. Anyway, here’s a CNET story on the Seriosity and its currency concept, which borrows from the multi-player game World of Warcraft.

We wrote about Seriosity last year, after it raised $2 million from Alloy Ventures, while its concept was still vague. It has raised a total of $6 million from Alloy, and has 27 employees.

Hopefully, the company has got something more serio(u)s up its sleeve! It’ll need it if it is going to raise a second round of funding — which it is looking for right now.