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.
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
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...
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.
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.
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.
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)
I think I'm gonna like it, but there's a tiny problem of orthography. Do I have to disinter my translation software, or can you give us a clue? PS: Moscow Metro had a super plastic-token system, but the locals insisted the green dayglo tokens were radioactive. Never did me any harm. harm. harm.
As a fun game, maybe when you posted the letter, the barcode would send you to a website where you could track the speedy progress of your precious missive through the Royal Mail's state of the art processing system (i.e. chucked in a big sack and forgotten for a week).
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
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.