Many events have occurred during my vacation over the past two weeks.  Let’s not even talk about the fluctuations in the stock market these days.  That only gets me depressed.  My portfolio is on a roller coaster ride.  Fun, but not quite.

On a side note, many tech companies are cutting down their workforce and going through some downsizing.  The magical number appears to be 30%.  Techcrunch has an interesting list that tracks the layoffs.  Even eBay is not immune to the current economy.

But not everything is bad news.  During my absence, some cool new developments are progressing on the green side.  So I’d like to cover this in order from oldest to most recent.

Earth Class Mail’s Postal Mail Thru Email

A bit farther back, Earth Class Mail introduced a new feature that allows you to view your images of your postal mail in your email and lets you process it from there.  It’s convenient to see what mail you are receiving before logging on to their website.  I actually find that to be a nifty feature.  As for the mail managing in the email part, I don’t see that as a great thing.  Being a bit techie myself, I know that you can’t actually process your mail inside.  You click on the button and you’ll get taken to their website to manage it.  Hmm… doesn’t that mean the same thing as me going to the website in the first place?  I could be wrong of course.

Shoeboxed’s Business Card Scanning

Shoeboxed announced over the past week that they now offer business card scanning on top of their receipt scanning.  I have to say that this makes their service more complete and better.  Their published screenshots show a nice user interface.

I also noticed that they have finally updated their website to a new layout with consistent pricing.  I  wish that they could have done this in the first place but my first impression is already tainted.  For first-time users who are checking out their service, I believe you will have a better experience.

MyPostalMail’s Virtual Post Solutions

This is perhaps the biggest and most exciting news of all.  Yesterday, MyPostalMail announced Virtual Post Solutions, a set of postal mail, package delivery, fax, and banking package solution they say will give paperless virtual office a whole new meaning.  I’ll just quickly go over some highlights that I think are interesting.

  • Sending and Receiving Postal Mail – Aside from receiving mail and viewing them online, they are adding the ability for you to send postal mail, similar to the other similar services that I wrote about earlier.  This is quite interesting because someone actually posted a comment in that other article asking about a service that offers you this exact thing.  So Jerick, this is my reply to your comment.
  • Sending and Receiving Faxes – They are also offering you a pay-per-use service to receive and send faxes directly through their system.  There are a myriad web-to-fax solutions out there, so competition will be fierce.  Personally, not so great a feature in my view.
  • Depositing Checks - Very very interesting service.  I can already imagine using this mailbox to receive my rebate checks and then have them deposit the checks for me.  I don’t even have to go to the bank since I rarely hit the banks these days as I do most of my banking online.  Saves me another trip.  And the fact that they support 5 US national banks without the need to use any special accounts is great.  This is the first time I’ve heard of anyone offering such a service.
  • Forwarding Packages – Send and receive packages through them.  The added feature is that they allow you to split and combine different packages into one. I can imagine some good uses for this, especially for people overseas.
  • Eliminating Junk Mail! - They are also doing a junk mail detection feature.  Now, given that this blog is focused on that, I’d love to see how this works… except I have no idea how it works!  The announcement isn’t very descriptive about this, but if this does truly work, it’d give an entirely different meaning to how we manage and eliminate junk mail.

If you are looking for more info, head over to MyPostalMail or their blog to read more about their services.

Back to the Real World

Now that I’m back from vacation, I should have a bit more time to continue writing up more news and reviews.  Nature never rests, and neither should I.