Kirkland, Washington based company Document Command Inc. has launched its consumer facing web interface for postal mail called Remote Control Mail. The service provides an alternative to PO Boxes, mail forwarding or waiting until you get home from the road to deal with your mail. The company receives your postal mail, scans the outside of what’s sent to you and provides a web interface to quickly sort through letters, bills, magazines and direct mailings. It looks like a lot of fun and very useful for some people. Though Remote Control Mail is targeted today towards niche users, that market size is not small and there are plans to extend related services to far more users. Document Command is working on a full scale robotics system that will provide even more functionality to institutions and mail customers in general.
Users of the service are able to quickly view the front of anything sent to them and choose between having the items shredded, recycled, archived, opened and scanned or forwarded to wherever they are in the physical world. Future features may include the ability to deposit checks to your bank account and automatically apply signatures to documents with just a few clicks.
Remote Control Mail is now available for personal users for an activation fee of $25 and monthly rates starting at $19.95 per month for up to 5 named mail recipients. Business plans are also available. Customers provide a Remote Control Mail address to anyone sending them mail and the company will forward selected mail wherever you request. Where legally permitted, the company will also forward to international addresses.
Through early testing the company has been able to determine behavioral statistics for postal mail customers with unprecedented detail. The company has found that 30% of incoming envelopes are ordered to be opened and scanned. After being scanned, 13% of recipients asked that the original mail piece be forwarded to them, 53% had the piece recycled and 34% had it shredded.
Those are the kind of aggregate statistics that businesses in many industries will probably pay for and could help things like direct mailings become more targeted and less annoying. Some consumers will no doubt have privacy concerns, but those concerns don’t seem atypical to me relative to what any direct service provider faces.
Document Command has an executive team strong in engineering, robotics and postal services. Though Remote Control Mail is far from fully automated today, the company is working on large scale automation of the processes and intends to cut postal labor costs around the world substantially. The video on the left is a short CAD clip demonstrating the mass sorting Document Command is aiming at. When you watch the video, see how it feels to say out loud “Robot, please forward me those important letters!”From rural postal customers to road warriors to touring rock stars, I can imagine that Remote Control Mail would be a compelling product for many people. If I was a rock star, I’d want to sort my mail like a rock star too. This is exactly the kind of web service that I foresee proving to be a viable business in the near future: the web is becoming a basic utility for any number of everyday practices. Services like this may well help older institutions keep up with the times, too.
why hasnt this been done before? has it been a scaling issue? seems like the robotics automation is the sauce here. very cool!
Seconded. This is very cool, useful and original. Best of luck!
Impressive and cool service!
I was wishing my UPS Store had this feature just the other day, but with an RSS feed.
Oh I want it.
This is an awesome idea. I remember in te earlier .com company where you could send a snail mail by sending off an email to a particular id. This is reverse
Paperless PO Box has been doing this for years. I subscribed to their service back in, I don’t know, 2000, and found it to be incredibly useful. They simply scanned everything to PDF, which worked fine for me.
The main hitch with this business is that it is very labor intensive, and is prone to error. There isn’t really a way around this, so you have to charge a decent amount of money to cover these costs. At the time, Paperless PO Box charged something like $20 per month, plus extras for scanning more than X number of items per month.
While I no longer use the service (I receive almost all bills electronically, and receive only junk at my snail mail address), I thought it was a great tool.
I guess the difference is that this new business is automating with roboticss…probably cuts costs meaningfully. otherwise, scaling problem.
Looks like a cool service,
it could be a killer-app for national postal industry the world over: just imagine how much money they could save - charging junk mailers to send, then notifying you that someone is sending you a letter and then giving you the freedom to decide whether you want to have it delivered or not. If you don’t respond at all, they will deliver.
But I imagine there could be no margin for error there, imagine them accidentally shredding somebody’s document and getting sued for it.
thank you thank you THANK YOU. this is a service i requested a year ago and I’m glad somebody finally built it-> http://www.scrollinondubs.com/.....nail-mail/
that pricepoint is reasonable too. Can anyone who is currently using comment on effectiveness?
sean
I agree - this is useful, and it’s a good idea. However, the adoption rate will be slow, like shopping online with your credit card. For a normal Joe, it would take time to get used to the idea and gain trust.
The post office can easily get into this business directly, and probably will, given they have the infrastructure in place already to gather and handle large volumes of mail.
I love this idea.
But, I would never trust this done at anything other than the post office level. You have to change all your address information with companies you deal with. Then what happens when this company goes out of business? And someone else rents their warehouse? Again you have to change all your addresses or your mail ends up God knows where. Are they capable of scanning your mail in a timely manner when they build up a good customer base and start getting millions of pieces of junk mail every day?
If the post office (for me Canada Post) offered this with my existing mailing address, it could be enabled and disabled with the flick of a switch. They would make a killing, because mail would still be sent, but they wouldn’t have to pay anyone to deliver it. Plus they already have the technology and facilities to read the envelopes
I’m less impressed, Paytrust will scan my bills for me, and let me pay them. So will a handfull of other services. Once you have that going on you can allways respond to critical items and the rest of yoru mail box is pretty light. They do it for half what these guys are charging too, and though get more sorting your actual ability to do usefull things is lower.
What I want to know is, who is Rob Wiener, and why the hell are you reading his mail?
I would be willing to pay the USPS directly for such a service. Not only that they already have some of the mass sorting capabilities and infrastructure, they employ many people with related skills. Like that idea, but will wait for a different provider.
I started using paytrust as soon as they launched (under a different name that I no longer remember), after a few years, I downgraded my account, and now I am going to cancel it all together as almost all my bills can be paid electronically.
I see this a good thing, Banks do a robotic thing already with checks, Tellers load a machine with sometimes up to 1500 check and press a button, each check is sorted; and taken a photo of.
- this company needs to - adapt some technology for atleast the 1st phase of the program (taking individual pics of un opened mail)
- Dont re-invent the wheel; just make cool rims!
This is really needed service for a lot people.
I could really have used it last year when we were in Europe for 2 months. Asking someone to check your mail every 2 days is no fun.
“Melanie” and “Daniel” - these are obvious company comments left under fake names. Bad form. Read the comments in Mike’s original post - these guys are total slime. http://www.techcrunch.com/2005.....reat-idea/
Just before the bubble burst, while I was working for a VC firm, we did seed funding for a company that was going to do exactly this. The firm imploded shortly afterwards, and I don’t know what happened to the company- presumably it died.
The market is bigger than a lot of people would suspect. This company’s initial niche was salespeople who are on the road most of the time. They probably number about a million, if not more, and a great idea can travel virally very fast amongst them.
I don’t know about the other posters here, but I personally find the idea of remotely controling my mail to be a good one. At work I”ve had my admin processing my mail (remotely for all intents or purposes) for years. Seems to me to be a natural for automation to step into the the things that can be automated, especially in an industry as devoid of progress as the is the postal services. FedEx has sure made a handsome profit by doing just that.
A couple of online services have been doing this very thing for years.
A quick Google search will turn them up, to those of you who “have been looking for this for years”
What happened to the LazyWeb? This is the lazy web in practice.
I bet the mafia hops all over this one.
This service has a lot of potential if not for issues surrounding trust and identity theft.
Althought, I am always calculating opportunity costs(eg, doing laundry vs taking to cleaners) for which thsi svc could be a real time saver, the thought of trusting some third party to open my personal mail, scan it and dispose/destry it properly is asking a lot. Unless they could somehow guarantee that the process is fully automated–without human intervention and mail was completed shredded, it would be a tough value proposition.
That being said,I’m sure Google would love to get their hands on this if it takes off. The opportunities for data mining and leveraging their existing ad network are endless.
Its a great and cool service!, but how about security? and privacy?
I’ve been looking for a service like this, and will be checking out the alternatives mentioned. It would be nice for someone to do a review of all the competition in this field of service.
Congrats to RCM for getting started, but competition is always a good thing. I would be interested to know, however, how does this get rid of your junk mail since (almost by definition) you cannot write to anyone in particular to change your “junk mail” address. Seems to me that I could change my address with a number of companies, but when I think about it, the companies that allow me to do so are the companies that send me mail I want to get immediately.
How can I get my junk mail sent there as well?
_______________________________________________________
This is another alternative to Domain Privacy for Popular Domain name holders who may want to actually filter out some of the unsolicited mail that come as a result of the Whois - but would not want to disregard all, which they would give up if they used domain privacy offered by registers.
Taking care of the phone number requirement could also be met with some of the services reviewed on techcrunch - such as throwaway numbers
what browser is being used in that image of the Remote Control Mail site?
AllEvolve - it looks like IE7 to me.
OH ok. Makes sense. It just looked very unfamiliar. I’m on a Mac - so go figure.
Hi folks,
Thanks for all the great comments and critiques. I’d like to address a few of them from above if it’ll help shed some light:
7. paperlesspobox.com, as far as we can tell, has been out of business for a long time. Like several other early pioneers they had half the concept right (IMHO). the key difference is that with RCM the envelope is physically cached until the recipient makes a determination as to whether it should be opened-and-scanned, shredded, forwarded, etc. Otherwise how is the scanner operator supposed to know what is unwanted mail, what’s important to you to have scanned, or what is so confidential that you want it shipped to you instead, etc.?
Several people asked about how we deal with security and confidentiality. First there’s the sealed envelope - which is barcoded as soon as it enters our facility and that barcode stays with the document for life… when it goes to be scanned, forward-shipped or even shredded, we always check the barcode… it’s core to our process patents. And we rescan the entire inventory on high speed equipment daily so that in the rare case (never happened so far) that a piece goes missing, we’ll know where/when, etc.
We are entering into an agreement with a national network of non-profit employers of disabled veterans to supply us with scanner operators nationwide - all of whom will have DOD clearances. When this arrangement is up and running then customers will actually be able to select “conventional” or “super high security” scanning, the latter being handled by mostly-Iraq war veterans who have Secret or Top Secret clearances. They will be issued pocketless uniforms (similar to the kind used in federal vaults), will be disallowed from having any personal items like cell phones, or even pen and paper in the operating area, and will be working in a “clean room” environment. The entire process while the envelope is open will be filmed on a proprietary witness video system we have developed called Documentary(tm) which literally makes a movie of your document being handled, and that movie can be watched up to 30 days after a document has been scanned, through the web, by the customer. We set out to really, really solve this problem once and for all, and for the law firms, healthcare facilities and government agencies already testing our service or planning to use it in the future, this is a key feature. No one else does this that we’re aware of. Stay tuned to the website to find out when we bring this element of the service live. Besides the “double bottom line” of creating high paying jobs for disabled vets, this offering makes it possible for government agencies to meet their “set aside quotas”, and in some cases is the only way they can contract out their mail processing to the private sector.
9. Sounds like you’ve been reading the white papers we’ve presented to the postal industry. And you may have noticed we have a former USPS Assistant Postmaster General on our board of directors - there’s a reason for that. Dr. Lynn managed hundreds of thousands of workers at USPS, and has helped us to architect a system that will indeed scale to national level deployment. I can tell you quite a few overseas post offices are engaged in due diligence on our technology and they’re watching very closely how customers behave when given a mouse to make their selections. Point of clarification, however: USPS is prohibited by statute from opening mail. All the EU post offices, in contrast, are privatized, and perform scanning of documents already. They just don’t have an integrated platform that connects everything… these are companies they’ve rolled up generally. If USPS did this it would have to be through an arms-length relationship with a private sector company (yes, we hope that’s us someday).
11. You’re probably right but we’re not really trying to build this business on consumer mail exclusively. Although 80% of mail is received residentially, the other 20% that goes to businesses and government are our primary business focus. This helps us operate the entire service at a lower cost for consumers (think airline tickets); it’s the businesses that will provide the high volume of invoices, checks, claim forms, mortgages, legal documents, etc., that will create the most document volume. Everyone else will benefit from the scale economics.
14. Paytrust is a great service for hundreds of thousands of customers, even though it is limited only to bills. We didn’t build RCM for every household. We built it for the 16 million households who get their mail at a PO Box; i.e. they have a reason not to get their mail at home. Maybe it’s because they live in a rural area the USPS won’t deliver to, they travel frequently, have multiple homes, want to filter unwanted mail, or have had their ID stolen out of their mailbox.
People tend to forget that they get many important things in their mail besides bills… it takes living overseas for an extended period of time, for example, to really feel the pain. You still need your mail for tax documents, insurance cards, wedding invitations, voting ballots (in some states), stuff that comes from relatives, kid’s schools, alumni associations, non-profits, etc. E-mail is great but it isn’t reliable for more than a few years on average. The average PO Box is rented for 15 years. We expect many of our customers will prefer to never hassle with changing their address again when they move, ever, and just keep their RCM accounts for life, regardless of where in the world they choose to travel or live. FWIW 44 million people file a change of address with USPS annually… and that doesn’t include the people who don’t bother… we’re a very mobile society.
26. We can’t use the “j word” for political reasons - no need to piss off the 300,000 good people who carry your mail every day - but we all know, they well know, the majority of the mail we get in our mailboxes is unwanted (57% statistically so far with our customer base). We offer both shredding and recycling because most people don’t know that once you shred a piece of paper it can’t be made into paper again, just tissue paper at best. With our customer base so far one third of discarded envelopes are shredded, two thirds are recycled. However, we recapture 100% of the discarded paper whereas the average rate in America is only 17% of mail getting recycled. The rest takes up 3% of our landfills. that’s a mattress of mail for the average American household annually. Serious problem, I think we can all agree.
In coming months we will be introducing the “UnMailMe” feature, which will let users contact mailers with just a mouse click… they can select “Don’t mail me this anymore because…” a) this person doesn’t live here, b) we get more than one copy, c) we don’t like this category, d) we don’t like this offer, e) we like this category/offer (e.g. golf catalog or Victoria’s Secret) but only buy certain times of the year. As someone pointed out above, marketers will covet this feedback because they have no other way of knowing anything about the people who don’t respond to their offers. This has to do with the revenue protection scheme of the list rental industry; they rent a one-time use of the name. Every wonder why you keep getting the same catalog for years even though you never buy anything from it? This is because your name is being rented as part of a “productive” list by that mailer, and they have no way of tracking that you’ve never purchased anything. Very wasteful. We’ll be able to tell marketers demographically (without specific user information) what kind of people they can stop mailing to, which will improve their response rates and reduce waste and frustration. Having run two catalog companies in a previous life, let me tell you this is extraordinarily valuable information to a marketer. If a user instructs us to contact the mailer directly with their specific request and address, we’ll do it (free to the user). We already have 18,000 major mailers aggregated in the database. Please look for a future announcement of this UnMailMe feature/service. It will be the first truly holistic method for getting off of lists you don’t want to be on.
Sorry for the REALLY long response but there were a lot of questions posed above. Also, please don’t hesitate to write to support@remotecontrolmail.com if you have specific questions. And thanks again for all the kind words… it’s gratifying after 2.5 years of development to hear how much people like the concept. Please keep the feedback and ideas coming.
Cheers,
Ron Wiener
CEO, Document Command
I was overseas for several months on business. This service would have been a livesaver for me. I missed so much mail during that time. Despite automating as much bill pay as possible, I missed stuff. I think if these guys partner with McKinsey, KBR, Bechtel and other companies which send people overseas, they will do very well.
It is a nice article.
I totally agree with anon (comment 19) - read Cameron Powell’s comment (number 15) on this thead - he’s basically threatening TechCrunch, a competing service, and is just downright unpleasant. Not the kind of company I’d want to do business with.
I think this is great. I went to school in England for a year during college and would of loved this service, heck I still would like it. People who move around a lot would benefit greatly. I am not concerned with privacy, how private is my mail box on the street? My mail sits in it all day and anyone can just come by and take a look. Even if these guys get some bad seeds in the business I would think it would still be safer than my current mail overall. Though when its gets forwarded on Im back to the same issue, oh well.
Forgot to mention, awesome response from the CEO, nice to see them looking at the feedback and listening to cutomers a bit.
I have been using a service similar to this since 2000 or so called PayMyBills.com — they give you a snail mail address and they open your bills, scan them, and then queue them up for you.
This seems to me to be the logical next step. I am very impressed.
After a long long time……….this is one hell of a COOL idea….really useful…and absolutely original………cheers to the promoters..
not sure that this will help direct marketers at all, considering that the user base for the data set is by definition quite niche - people who use advanced web services and so on - and since the mail is not opened at all, there is no way to determine contents or category to aid in study of campaign results…
however, with that said, the idea is definitely niche - and if mailboxes etc offered this (ever - hope they’re reading!) i’d jump all over it, that way i’d have the option to pick up 24 hours in a local lockbox OR forward etc…or kinko’s, they’ve got the equipment and infrastructure in place already, nationwide…with secure digital delivery and transfer and all of the record keeping machines in motion…
Wow. That looks great. Though I’m not about to pay $19.95/mo. for the service. I’ll wait till it becomes a commodity.
Ron - You are a cheat and a liar.
Anon – agreed
From what I have heard a lot of people have suffered from Ron’s “business practices” while he gets rich.
I wouldn’t trust my mail with a company he is in charge of.
Whoa there - I disagree with Hank and anon (probably the same guy).
They are full of tripe.
I love Ron and the way he treats those of us who are customers of his business. This is a non-paid testimonial and I am very satisfied with the service. I would pay $100 a month for the service if I had to.
- Hank in Detroit.
I agree with Hank and Ron.
This is a good way for me to screen out the letter bombs that are sent to me by my mafia friends.
Good luck Ron !
Can you please stop arguing and just try the service ?
Why can’t we all just get along ?
Peace & Love to all capitalists.
Oooh look at my boobies.
They are so big and bouncy.
Ron paid for them with his profits.
I love Ron.
Yes my love.
They are gorgeous and worth every penny.
Oooh
Wht r u tryng to say I cnt understnd u
spam spam spam
Awesome response from the CEO, by the way. Not only is he the CEO, he has also recently been nominated for sainthood.
Saint Ron the Wienerdude
Amazing the negative comments from those that haven’t yet tried the service. I have … I signed up about six weeks ago and have found the service and features to be as advertized. Since I am out of the country a lot, this service will be very helpful to me. Hopefully this venture company will be one of the ones that succeeds.
Morris (currently in Thailand)
hexopkub ibpcwe nxajblwo trpbaefun cbip limr biwa