E-Stamp Corp claims to be the first internet postage company to begin shipping products following the US Postal Service approval of its products on Monday. On Tuesday the company reported orders for its service were in the hundreds. Stamps.com, which has also gone through the 10-stage approval process set in place by the Postal Service, hasn’t yet begun shipments, but expects to do so shortly. It says it’s currently converting over its 1,500 beta customers to the commercial service, which will be available nationwide over the coming months. E-Stamp also has 1,500 beta testers, the maximum allowed under the Postal Service’s evaluation period rules. Pitney Bowes Inc and NeoPost Inc have yet to gain approval for their internet products but are likely to be approved shortly, the Postal Service said.
E-Stamp claims the reason it was first to market was due to it gaining early approval for beta testing, back in March 1998. Currently, E-Stamp is sticking to its offline approach, using a storage vault made by Dallas Semiconductor Corp connected to the PC’s serial port. Stamp.com uses a secure web site. E-Stamp says it has chosen to focus on an offline approach because its research has shown that majority of small businesses and home offices do not have a persistent internet connection and prefer the offline option. As broadband to the home increases, the online solution may become a viable option, the company said, and says it does have plans for a web site option, targeted at a different market segment.
NeoPost said it would offer customers a choice in how they download and print postage. It already has a computer-integrated metering system, Simply Postage, on the market, which works with both PC and Macintosh operating systems. Users download, store and print digital postage on self-adhesive labels from a dedicated thermal printing device. It isn’t internet connected, however, and can’t be integrated with existing office applications. Later this year, Hayward, California-based NeoPost, the second largest producer of mailroom equipment in the world, plans an offline PC Postage product which downloads and stores postage within an electronic vault connected to the serial port – the same approach taken by E-Stamp. A third planned product, PostagePlus, will enable users to download postage from a secure web server, like Stamps.com.
Pitney Bowes also plans to offer two approaches, and demonstrated ClickStamp Plus and ClickStamp Online at the Post Office event in Washington on Monday. Plus also uses a postage vault for offline storage, while Online will work from a web site. Both use Pitney Bowes patented technology, the company said. Pitney Bowes also plans a ValueShip internet shipping service and mailing list services, and has an existing Personal Post digital postage meter.
Cylink Corp, the Sunnyvale, California-based security firm, said it had now finalized the installation of public key infrastructure (PKI) technology at the postal operations center in San Mateo, California. It serves as the foundation for both Monday’s Information Based Indicia Program launch and for the Postal Service’s future electronic postal services, the company said. Cylink says it built the entire security infrastructure and the security components of the system, using multi-processing Sparc-based hardware offering full auditing and accountability of transactions, and a recovery mechanism for interrupted transactions. Cylink plans to introduce its first commercial release of PKI products next month.
