That’s the premise behind Venmo, a stealthy but buzzy start-up that just closed its first funding round. The four-man team gathered up something in the $300,000 to $400,000 range, I’m told. Investors include Betaworks, Lerer Media Ventures, and, oddly, given that it’s a modest angel funding round, RRE Ventures.

The big difference between Venmo and its much bigger mobile payment competitors–both Boku and Zong, for instance, have millions of venture capital dollars behind them–is that Venmo doesn’t involve the mobile carriers, which can take 30 percent or more of each transaction they process.

That might be okay for virtual goods, like sheep for your Farmville game, since you’re just throwing money away in the first place. But if you want to send a friend $5, you don’t want her to end up with $3.50. And you don’t want to give AT&T (T) or Verizon (VZ) another $2.14 to place the full $5 into your pal’s account.

So Venmo simply sets up an account for each user, funded by a checking account or credit card, and moves the money into other Venmo accounts. Simple and clever, if it works.

A few obvious stumbling points:

• Red ink: Venmo doesn’t charge individual users for transactions, so it’s going to lose money on each transfer since it has to eat credit card fees, etc. The plan is to make that up by charging commercial users–your local coffee shop or flea market vendor or whatever business sets up an account–a 3.5 percent fee for each transaction.
• Fine print: The Venmo team–headed by Betaworks veteran Andrew Kortina and Iqram Magdon-Ismail, his former Penn roommate–doesn’t anticipate problems. But smart folks I talk to think that at a minimum, the start-up will have to turn itself into a credit card company or a bank to satisfy regulators. Certainly doable, but that’s the kind of stuff that requires time and money and comes with big penalties if you get it wrong.
• Trust: The big one–this thing doesn’t work, period, unless people are comfortable moving money back and forth via a four-man company they’ve never heard of. But the only way to combat that is to let people try. Venmo is in private beta now, but allows friends to invite friends and plans on opening up to a wider audience in the next month. Another option for New Yorkers: Drop by tonight’s New York Tech Meetup, where the team will be handing out invites.

I liked it, actually. The Twitter dudes came off just fine. And if Twitter fans thought Dowd came off as condescending or smarmy, then they ought to brace themselves, because there’s going to be plenty more like this.

But here’s my real question: Who is operating Maureen Dowd’s Twitter account? Because according to her own column, she can think of other things she’d like to do than Tweet:

“I would rather be tied up to stakes in the Kalahari Desert, have honey poured over me and red ants eat out my eyes than open a Twitter account. Is there anything you can say to change my mind?”

But as Editor & Publisher editor Greg Mitchell notes, someone opened an account with Dowd’s name last year. It’s not scintillating stuff–like many journalists’ accounts, it’s basically a promotional device for her work–but it does have some 5,000 followers.

Of course, Twitter doesn’t actually require people to prove they are who their Twitter accounts say they are, so it’s entirely possible Dowd’s account is a fake, set up by a well-meaning fan. My hunch: It’s actually set up by the Times itself and operated by a well-meaning staffer. (Tellingly, the account isn’t “following” anyone, which pretty much anyone who gives Twitter a try does at some point.)

UPDATE: I’m wrong, says NYT spokesperson Catherine Mathis. Or at least, I’m probably wrong: “It does not belong to Maureen Dowd. It appears as though it was created by someone outside The Times.”

Either way, you’d think Dowd would have noted the account at sometime in the last few months–perhaps while she was prepping for her interview at Twitter HQ.

I’ve asked the Times (a bit sheepishly, I’ll admit) for details on this pressing story. I’ll update as soon as I get them.

Verizon (VZ) said Thursday night that “a number of Verizon Wireless employees have, without authorization, accessed and viewed President-Elect Barack Obama’s personal cell phone account.” Verizon says the phone is a “simple flip-phone,” and not a Berry, and that it has been inactive for several months. But the startling public admission should be enough to convince Obama, if he needed any more prompting, that he’s going to have to give up his prized gadget.

It may also prompt Verizon to rethink its long-running ad campaign where its customers are followed around by hordes of the mobile company’s employees.