Slashdot Mirror
UK's Royal Mail Launches First Intelligent Stamps
An anonymous reader writes "The Royal Mail on Friday issued what it called the world's first 'intelligent stamps,' designed to interact with smartphones using image-recognition technology. The Royal Mail's latest special-issue stamps, devoted to historic British railways, are designed to launch specially developed online content when a user snaps them using an image-recognition application available on iPhone or Android handsets. 'This is the first time a national postal service has used this kind of technology on their stamps and we're very excited to be bringing intelligent stamps to the nation's post,' a Royal Mail spokesman said in a statement. 'Intelligent stamps mark the next step in the evolution of our stamps, bringing them firmly into the 21st century.'"
I beat it to the first post. Take that stamp.
2D barcodes designed to be read by a phone, largely for marketing purposes, have been in use in Japan since forever.
Also, this is pointless.
Except for philately (marketing to collectors is a somewhat lucrative way to raise money for postal services), are not stamps with nice designs on the way out? Go to the post office in many countries today, and what you'll get on your letter is a simple sticker printed by a computer with a bar code or other machine-readable images. The recipient of your letter in another country no longer gets an exotic representation of some facet of your country's culture.
It's kind of the phone that is providing all the intelligence, right? I mean, you have to dig pretty far before you can call an image intelligent.
When printable rfids become cheaper it'd be cool to have letters that track themselves but there's really no demand and it'd be too expensive right now. augmented reality tags on stamps is a pretty cool idea though.
So... how will putting phone-scannable barcodes on stamps actually help? And what do I need it for?
I wish they'd spend on the money on something else. Like - I don't know - perhaps inproving their piss poor service, delivering my post before noon etc etc etc etc
Whatever. Who cares?
All we want from the Royal Mail is for them to deliver the letters. On time would be a bonus. The postman not opening every 'amazon.co.uk' branded packet and stealing the contents would probably be a bit too much to ask for though.
What nugget of brilliance from a marketing department is is this? What the fuck does this give you that a web site with a handful of links (1 per stamp) would not? What is the point of downloading an image recognition app and going to the trouble of photographing a stamp when clicking on a link would do just as well?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I seriously don't see how this can be useful aside from keeping up the price of stamps.
Tomorrow is another day...
nt
They have a kind now that you can send right from the iphone and it gets there instantly without a stamp or envelope, and it's free.
I think that's kind of more high-tech than a stamp you can take a picture of.
Look Around You, and you may find the announcement for the intelligent calcium stamp, featuring the more "advanced" elements of the periodic table.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
by bushwellian decree (wolfowitz papers), as carried out by the royal henchmen & their hired goons. in the end (where we're taking it now) many of the royals will be rich as nazis.
meanwhile (barring any nuclear 'backfire' (not to worry though, the royals will be at a safe distance)); the corepirate nazi illuminati is always hunting that patch of red on almost everyones' neck. if they cannot find yours (greed, fear ego etc...) then you can go starve. that's their (slippery/slimy) 'platform' now. see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_personality_disorder
never a better time to consult with/trust in our creators. the lights are coming up rapidly all over now. see you there?
greed, fear & ego (in any order) are unprecedented evile's primary weapons. those, along with deception & coercion, helps most of us remain (unwittingly?) dependent on its' life0cidal hired goons' agenda. most of our dwindling resources are being squandered on the 'wars', & continuation of the billionerrors stock markup FraUD/pyramid schemes. nobody ever mentions the real long term costs of those debacles in both life & any notion of prosperity for us, or our children. not to mention the abuse of the consciences of those of us who still have one, & the terminal damage to our atmosphere (see also: manufactured 'weather', hot etc...). see you on the other side of it? the lights are coming up all over now. the fairytail is winding down now. let your conscience be your guide. you can be more helpful than you might have imagined. we now have some choices. meanwhile; don't forget to get a little more oxygen on your brain, & look up in the sky from time to time, starting early in the day. there's lots going on up there.
"The current rate of extinction is around 10 to 100 times the usual background level, and has been elevated above the background level since the Pleistocene. The current extinction rate is more rapid than in any other extinction event in earth history, and 50% of species could be extinct by the end of this century. While the role of humans is unclear in the longer-term extinction pattern, it is clear that factors such as deforestation, habitat destruction, hunting, the introduction of non-native species, pollution and climate change have reduced biodiversity profoundly.' (wiki)
"I think the bottom line is, what kind of a world do you want to leave for your children," Andrew Smith, a professor in the Arizona State University School of Life Sciences, said in a telephone interview. "How impoverished we would be if we lost 25 percent of the world's mammals," said Smith, one of more than 100 co-authors of the report. "Within our lifetime hundreds of species could be lost as a result of our own actions, a frightening sign of what is happening to the ecosystems where they live," added Julia Marton-Lefevre, IUCN director general. "We must now set clear targets for the future to reverse this trend to ensure that our enduring legacy is not to wipe out many of our closest relatives."--
"The wealth of the universe is for me. Every thing is explicable and practical for me .... I am defeated all the time; yet to victory I am born." --emerson
no need to confuse 'religion' with being a spiritual being. our soul purpose here is to care for one another. failing that, we're simply passing through (excess baggage) being distracted/consumed by the guaranteed to fail illusionary trappings of man'kind'. & recently (about 10,000 years ago) it was determined that hoarding & excess by a few, resulted in negative consequences for all.
consult with/trust in your creators. providing more than enough of everything for everyone (without any distracting/spiritdead personal gain motives), whilst badtolling unprecedented evile, using an unlimited supply of newclear power, since/until forever. see you there?
"If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land." )one does not need to agree whois in charge to grasp the notion that there may be some assistance available to us(
boeing, boeing, gone.
is in the eye of the beholder...not in the stamps..
I just wish they would stop wasting money on such gimmicks and actually bother to deliver the mail correctly. I received someone's birthday card a while back, the house number was a match for mine but the rest of the address wasn't close. Was in the same town of course, but rather than ruin someone's birthday I hand delivered the card myself.
So to sum up, the Royal Mail can't even be bothered to deliver until after noon and it seems like they now are employing people who can't even be bothered to deliver to the correct address.
But hey, they have "cool" stamps.
Okay, how the fuck is this YRO? Yet another indication of sliding Slashdot quality. How does this even have to do with the internet itself? No copyright stuff, no censorship, etc etc. How do these stamps affect our Internet freedom? If I didn't follow the Twitter feed and see occasionally interesting topics, I would be long done with this site.
It's a shame Royal Mail have spent lord knows how much on this useless gimmick whilst cutting back the number of deliveries and driving up the cost of stamps year on year.
Their job is to deliver mail. Once they get that right, and start booking profits and reinvesting that cash back into the network, then fine, let them make as many gimmicks as they like.
That time isn't now.
"We live in a global world" - Harvey Pitt, former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman
Physical stamps are still quite available, but the postal clerks use number-and-barcode labels, particularly for items with an unusual postage charge (if it's a standard letter [44c], for instance, they might just grab a 44c stamp from the drawer, but if it's something like $2.63, they'll print out a barcode label rather than dig for exactly $2.63 worth of stamps)
There's also click-and-ship (print shipping labels online), which essentially combines a computer-printed address label with barcode postage. [I like that because it saves the trouble of handwriting addresses and customs info, can be done from home at my convenience, and it's a few percent cheaper as well.]
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
I don't want online content from my postage stamps. I want an efficient postal service. No doubt you could do the same thing with milk bottles, soap packets and jars of jam to "bring them into the 21st century", but it wouldn't make the milk, soap or jam somehow better.
Cress, cress, lovely lovely cress
So let me get this right...
1) Buy stamp with one of 6 pictures on it
2) Download App onto your phone using part of my monthly quota (and possibly have to pay for the App as well)
3) Using the App have it recognize one of 6 images (remember Google goggles can manage images of tons of things...)
4) Use the phone to download and read/listen to some web content using more of my quota on the tiny screen and low quality speaker
Seems complex and expensive when it could be
1) Put a short and easy to remember web address of the content on the bottom of the stamps and maybe some posters in the Post Office (the few that are left)
2) Type the address into my web browser on my PC with big screen, good speakers and unlimited use...
Or
1) Go to local library, borrow book for free with many poems including the one relating to the stamps on it and read while enjoying the sunshine...
Sometimes technology is not the answer you have been looking for
[The Universe] has gone offline.
Okay, I like trains, and would probably check out the content the first time I got a letter with such a stamp on it... but the second time? No.
And who thought of the GREAT idea of linking postal stamps to online stuff? "Hey, old chap, let's do something that reminds our customers how little they actually need us!" :)
If the Royal Post delivered things in a timely manner, didn't randomly go on strike all the time, and had "tracking" that actually tracked beyond "...and then we gave the letter to another country's post, and we have no idea what happened next," it'd be a lot more useful.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
That's what 'they' call it. by adding the 'tactical' feature/adjective, it's implied that the damage is 'contained'. this is what we wanted?as good as it gets?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat
Yeah, no one has ever thought about linking physical objects with the online world...
Learn to love Alaska
Why not incorporate a QR-code symbol in the stamp? That would work on almost any phone without requiring special apps.
Sounds a touch like it....
Making an over-glorified bar code analog into a stamp which allows one to easily be linked to content is just a worthless ploy to generate revenue, as each time a poor yob scans one, they will likely make more off the resulting page hit (Thanks Advertising!) than they will from the sale of the stamp less the cost of delivering the letter.
I would wager that if someone has a phone which is capable of reading these "intelligent" stamps, they most likely know how to get more information than they wanted dealing with conceivable topic which a stamp could express in less time than installing the software to read the stamp.
Just the name screams marketing ploy and literally adds nothing to an infrequent, inconvenient, but occasional legally useful way of sending typed or written communication.
barcode on a stamp, that makes it intelligent?
or is the smartphone intelligent?
...is to pay for postage online, print out the stamp/code/whatever, affix it to my letter, drop it in the mail. I don't know if such a service is available in other countries, but here in the USA it's only available (AFAIK) from outfits like stamps.com where you have to pay $15.99 a month before you pay for any postage. The postal service does offer Click-N-Ship, which is about what I want, but it's only available for Priority Service, not First Class or parcel service. So, what is so hard about online postage?
I thought they were going to be RFIDs or something like that
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
C'mon, it's only for fun, and costs bankrupt GPO very little. Could animate a Harry Potter picture? Plus, all stamp designs are approved by HM Queen, so they'll have to show her with an iPhone. Would you spoil that tableau?
in germany there's a mobile service that sends you a 12-digit code you can just write on the envelope using a pen, like so:
5 0 0 7
6 9 3 9
5 6 1 1
very smart
(unfortunately more expensive than a normal stamp, wtf)
http://stop-net.info LOL
Ever since I first time saw this images on what was then introduced me as "smart paper" I have hated them (or rather the "smart" hype) because there is nothing anymore smart than barcode is smart in them. And nobody in their right mind would call barcode smart.
In capitalist USA corporations control the government.