Going Postal

Several weeks ago, a Certain Relative of mine sent me a birthday card and I was shocked to discover that this Certain Relative's photo was on the stamp. This confused me; I thought you had to be dead for 10 years to get your picture on a stamp--raising all sorts of existential questions. As it turns out, Stamps.com offers what they call PhotoStamps--you can upload any picture and have it output onto a set of stamps. (It costs 80 cents, which includes the 37 cents postage.) And miscreants beware: yes, there was a period where they weren't paying attention to the images people were uploading, and you can probably imagine what got through, but there is now a rigorous approval process in place. Baby pictures, graduation pictures, wedding pictures--all can be foisted on unsuspecting mailmen. (And, yes, it's all real postage.)

Printing industry watchers pay heed: The ordering and uploading is all done using a Web-to-print interface--the image is uploaded, colors, themes, and borders are chosen, etc., and the stamps are printed digitally. Stamps.com targets its services to small businesses and home offices, and has partnered with Microsoft, CompUSA, EarthLink, HP, NCR, Office Depot, Vendio--oh, and the U.S. Postal Service, natch. PhotoStamps proved extremely popular: during an initial market test last year, in a 7-1/2 week period, more than 2.75 million individual PhotoStamps were ordered.

And the stamps are pressure-sensitive, so we don't have to endure the obvious pun, as someone is affixing postage to an envelope, "I've got you licked."