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From...
Print your own digital stamps
September 14, 1998
Web posted at: 11:45 PM EDT
by Glenn McDonald
(IDG) -- Neither rain nor sleet nor snow will keep the U.S. Post Office from delivering your mail--if you've slapped the right postage on it. And soon you'll be able to do just that without ever leaving your desk.
Around year-end, you should be able to purchase and stamp your own mail through your PC, as a new way of attaching digital postage becomes widely available for PC users. This new breed of digital stamps -- no glue, no postage meters -- allows users to download legal postage 24 hours a day and print directly onto envelopes and labels using a regular laser or ink jet printer.
Officially called the Information Based Indicia Program, the digital stamp initiative was launched in 1996 by the U.S. Postal Service, with the hope of developing a secure and convenient postage process to complement (and possibly replace) the 75-year-old postage meter. The idea was to open up the technology to commercial development, with the Postal Service enforcing security and specific interface requirements. The first prototypes and demonstration products were submitted last year.
Three commercial applications, each with its own proprietary method of selling digital postage, have entered beta testing. These services plan to charge a nominal amount over actual postage costs (which go straight to the USPS) for the convenience. Several more companies are expected to begin trial runs later this year.
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E-Stamp
E-Stamp, which received the first OK from the USPS to enter beta testing, is offering a hardware-and-software solution that should be available toward the end of this year for less than $200 retail, according to director of product marketing Milton Howard.
The E-Stamp Internet Postage Desktop Edition includes a CD-ROM plus a cigarette-box-size "electronic vault" which connects to a PC printer through your printer's parallel port. Users would connect to E-Stamp via a secure Internet line (as with any e-commerce transaction) and buy bulk postage all at once, plus an additional--and undetermined--transaction fee. After that, postage can be printed onto envelopes or labels at any time offline.
"The advantage to the desktop edition is that you don't have to be connected to the Internet when you want to print your postage," Howard said.
E-Stamp is also working on an HTML-based process that would require no hardware or software; rather, it would work like any real-time e-commerce system, allowing users to download postage from E-Stamp's Web site. The as-yet-unnamed HTML system has not entered beta testing, Howard said.
StampMaster
StampMaster, a California-based company that entered USPS-approved beta testing second, also will sell a solution requiring no hardware or initial retail purchase. Users will simply download StampMaster client software and subsequent digital postage from a secure Web server. Ari Engelberg, vice president of business development, said the product will likely be available in early 1999, pending final approval by the USPS.
"With our system, you would pay for your actual postage using a variety of methods--credit card payment, wire transfer -- and that goes directly to the post office, through our software" Engelberg said. "How you pay us is on a monthly basis. Prices will look something like $2.95 for up to 100 stamps, and upwards from there. We're looking at capping out fees at $10 per month."
PC Stamp
A third digital stamp system from veteran business postage company NeoPost was approved for beta testing just last week.
NeoPost's PC Stamp system is also slated to ship in the first quarter of 1999, pending USPS approval, said director of marketing and business development Jon Kim. Like E-Stamp, PC Stamp will require the purchase of a PC peripheral storage device for downloading postage online. NeoPost is also developing a software-only solution called Postage Plus that lets account holders download postage one stamp at a time from a secured NeoPost Web site. Pricing is not yet determined, although Kim said both the hardware and software offerings would be "priced competitively."
All three services will support Windows 95, 98, and NT; support for Windows 3.x, the Macintosh, or other platforms has not yet been determined.