I believe I was the first. See the following post


If there is a demand for it, I might be tempted to start a webservice like the faucet where people can buy vanity addresses for a small bitcoin fee. I have a simple handshake scheme which allows me to generate a new address for you without me finding out your private key. My method sounds like it's faster than Gavin's and mathematically it's non-trivial. It can find addresses containing a short string like "gavin" in a fraction of a second for example.

ByteCoin