I was wrong, wrong, wrong. Last week, I said the e-mail part of Symantec's Norton AntiVirus hijacks your e-mail to some evil remote server, but it doesn't, as a couple hundred people explained to me recently in excruciatingly embarrassing detail. It's my fault for sure, and I am sorry. The mail never leaves your machine. Instead, its viruses are checked in a kind of pseudo proxy server that is right there on your desk all along. I feel so stupid. And I'm sorry, too, that I got into this mess by accepting the tip without checking it in the first place. (It came from a professional programmer of some repute who has been my friend for many years and came to me with the item.) Eager to get on a plane to Japan, I just took him at his word. Again, I am sorry.

So now, having fallen on my sword, I am writing from Kyoto, where in a few hours I will besiege Fortress Nintendo. Earlier in the day, back in Tokyo, I had breakfast with Kay Nishi, the legendary Japanese computer guy who, as a vice president of Microsoft, was the one who demanded back in 1980 that the company do a deal with IBM for MS-DOS. "IBM, IBM, IBM!" he shouted, banging his fist on the table. Hardly anyone does that to Bill Gates anymore. Our breakfast, on the 41st floor of the Park Hyatt, was more subdued, with the high point being invited back to Kay's wedding on May 5th. Music will be provided by the Tokyo Philharmonic.

And all the while this is happening, CNN International makes it sound like Wall Street has come unhinged. Is there anything we can do to avoid such mayhem in the future? I think there is.

A myth of the dot-com stock meltdown is that high tech and Internet companies are failing at a higher rate than ever before. This simply isn't true. The failure rate of startup companies has always been high � in excess of 90 percent. This just happens to be the first time the rest of us have been allowed to share in the carnage.

As I explained in this column long ago, dot-coms chose to go public in the late 1990s at a point in their development where historically they would have opted, instead, for a final round of venture funding. They chose to go public simply because they could. Silly us, we were willing to buy their shares, often at ridiculously high prices. We bought dot-com shares under much more generous terms than the venture capitalists would have demanded for that aborted final round, so ours was not only naive money, but cheap money, allowing the founders to preserve more equity for themselves than the ravenous VCs would have tolerated. The VCs sanctioned these dot-com IPOs because it allowed them to put less money in each company and thereby spread their risk over a larger portfolio of startups. And those IPOs put VCs and founders, alike, that much closer to their ultimate goal of cashing out and buying that big house.

So the NASDAQ killing field is not so surprising, just unfortunate. Most of those companies were doomed anyway. Is this any way to run an industry? Well, yes and no. It worked well enough to give us Apple and Sun and Compaq and Dell and Microsoft and Cisco, but it could work a lot better. The system of private equity funding that makes so many venture capitalists rich yet kills so many companies is arcane in the extreme. There is no standardized way for companies to go about raising money, none of the information and transparency that are mandated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for companies that have already gone public, and there sure isn't much liquidity. Trying to sell your shares in even the best and most promising startup prior to its IPO is virtually impossible. But all that might be about to change, thanks to -� you guessed it -� an Internet startup, that's aimed at bringing uniformity, transparency, and liquidity to the private equity business.

Round1 Private Capital Marketplace is the San Francisco startup with these grand dreams. Started by Jamie Cohan, 34, a veteran dot-commer who raised $30 million in several rounds for a previous company and found the fundraising process both inefficient and degrading, Round1 is, itself, no foundling, having the financial backing of Nomura Securities and Allianz, the giant European insurance company. "Our plan," says Cohan, "is to do the same thing for private equity that other institutions have already done for the public equity and high yield (junk bond) markets. These other markets used to be relationship-based. Getting to participate in a deal, even learning that a deal existed, depended entirely on whom you knew. These weren't markets, they were clubs, but to grow they had to eventually gain openness and transparency and the clubs were eventually replaced by automated markets. We'll do the same thing for private equity."

Why bother? While venture capitalists lost money in 2000, their historic returns have averaged more than 100 percent annually for the last couple decades. Any financial business where you can double your money year after year is a darned good business, but the rest of us have been shut out of private equity. It's a $1.7 trillion business that most of us barely know exists, much less know how to participate in. There are startups like Garage.com and Offroad Capital that have attempted to give entrepreneurs and high net worth individuals a way to play in this business, but nothing before Round1 attempted to bring true automation to private equity financing.

Two years ago, a Round1 would have been started with the idea of disintermediation �- using Internet technology to cut traditional players like venture capitalists and investment banks clean out of the financing deal. But times have changed. "We never use the 'D' word -� disintermediation," says Cohan. "That would be foolish, because it is the very people we would be trying to disintermediate who bring us the deals. Those outfits are our customers, and what we do for them is apply automation to the very tasks they were doing inefficiently in the past."

Round1's first product, introduced in February, is the Private Capital Automation System (PCAS). For companies already involved in private equity financing, PCAS is workflow software that can replace and standardize the systems they are presently using to keep track of the hundreds of potential deals in process at any moment for a major VC or investment bank. Or, going further, PCAS would allow one of these firms to offer a complete private equity marketplace to its customers. Such a marketplace, hosted on Round1's servers but labelled as belonging to, say, a Kleiner Perkins, Hummer-Winblad, or Merrill Lynch, would give entrepreneurs a Web interface for applying for financing. Forms and documents would describe the financing opportunity, holding on the server for potential investors a complete description of the company, its principals, prospects, and dreams. Qualified investors could do their due diligence completely online, perusing the information, literally watching the company's roadshow online.

"Our goal is to make everyone involved in these transactions happier," said Cohan. "We want happier entrepreneurs who can spend less time raising money and more time building their companies, happier General Partners who know they paid the right price for their equity, happier limited partners who can track the performance of their investment and have liquidity if they need it, and happier regulators who know this is an open and standardized market."

As the line between private and public markets blurs, outfits like Round1 will offer automated systems that can bring a standardized, regulated environment to many types of transactions. Venture capital firms could use PCAS to allow America's more than one million high net worth individuals to become a new source of capital. LBO firms like KKR and Forstmann Little could use it create an instant Internet strategy. Fidelity Investments could use it to create Private Equity mutual funds. Even an Exxon could use PCAS to turn its oil and gas properties into securities. Anything that throws off cash flow can be traded using this system.

The challenge in this is finding the correct way to value an opportunity, avoiding both droughts of liquidity and speculative bubbles. It isn't a substitute for common sense and it won't change the fact that more than 90 percent of startups fail. They'll just fail earlier, taking fewer of us down with them.