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P Sreevalsan Menon
Mumbai, Aug 9: For many of us, going to the nearby post office to buy stamps is often a waste of time. Long queues in front of the stamp desk are definitely a discouraging site. For a moment at least you must have thought of putting enough postage at the comfort of home and without wasting time in these queues.
Well, that's what precisely brought Ari Engelberg, Jeff Green, Jim McDermott, three business students to technocrat Mohan Ananda to design stamps.com, the first server-based Internet postage product. The service is at present available in US only but the company says it is evaluating other markets.
The users can start using the internet postage by downloading the stamps.com software free of cost. The company claims that the advantage here is that the customers need not install any additional hardware. Once installed, the users can browse through the most recent US postal service rates with stamps.com software making sure that no wastage is pasted on the envelops.The user can enter the approximateweight of the package and the rate at which he wants to send it. For customers, who send lot of packages, the plan may work at best. And once the customer writes the address on the envelop, stamps.com prints exact postage directly onto envelopes, business documents or lables using an ordinary laser or inkjet printer.
The advantage of internet postage is that it automatically confirms and corrects the address, adds the postal index codes and formats addresses using postal abbreviations that fasten the delivery. More over, the customers can obtain postage regardless of time. Globally, this new form of postage based on the internet is known as indicium.
All-round cost saving is the most important aspect of this system. Customers are given real-time purchasing of postage and a complete log of all postage printing transactions. No paper is wasted here either.
Stamps.com has also taken care to provide news on changes in postage costs or other related information to customers on site. The system is protectedfor transactions with a proprietary e-commerce system that meets the US government's highest standards for computer security.
The internet postage or indicium market is estimated to be worth $40 billion by next year. Stamps.com, which recently received investment funding from Intel Corporation, is also entering the small office/home office market to widen its reach.
Copyright © 1999 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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This story was printed from Net Express located at http://www.expressindia.com. Net Express provides a portal to India, with news from The Indian Express and The Financial Express along with sites on travel and tourism, the entertainment industry, the power sector, the environment and much more.
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