We first covered Earth Class Mail in September 2005 (then called Remote Control Mail), and then again when they launched in late 2006. Today they are announcing a $13.3 million round of financing ($7.4 million of the round was closed last September and $2.84 million was previously raised convertible debt). The round was led by Ignition Partners and included angels from Keiretsu Forum.

Users direct snail mail to the service, which opens and scans it. It can then be shredded and recycled or forwarded. It’s expensive, but it is definitely a useful service.

The founders are also creating a video show about their startup experience, called “Start-up Junkies.” It will show on MOJO beginning on January 24. Warning: it’s going to be super cheesy.

Start-Up Junkies takes you behind the scenes of a rapid-growth technology start-up company as it goes through the trials and tribulations of raising angel and venture-capital investment, attracting seasoned start-up “junkies” to the management team, launching new products and dealing with all the people issues that arise when employees wake up running at Mach 3, every day of the week.

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.

Company: Remote Control Mail
Launched: Will launch early October
Funding: Closing Angel Round
Location: Portland, OR (development also in Russia)

Overview

RemoteControlMail will provide you with a permanent (snail) mail address, gather all of your incoming mail, scan (the outside), notify you of its existence (with the outside scan), scan the inside if you like (for a fee), and then either forward it to you or shred it, on your command.

You can sign up now for RCM. The service will begin working in a couple of weeks.

Who would want this? Anyone who moves a lot or maintains multiple residences. Businesses that need a physical mailing presence in another city. People who are concernced about identity theft (everyone should be). Or people who just want more cyber-control over their real world mail.

I spoke with the founder and CEO, Ron Wiener, today about RemoteControlMail’s launch a few days ago and got a better understanding of the service.

Dealing with real, actual (snail) mail isn’t very much fun. An endless and prodigious trail of junk mail comes through our mailbox (and incidentally, only 17% of it is ultimately recycled). As a country we get over 200 billion pieces of mail a year.

Remote Control Mail is the first company to try to solve this problem for us by virtualizing our real-world mail box.

Once you register, Remote Control Mail assigns you a permanent mailing address and you can then redirect all or some of your incoming mail to that address.

Upon receiving a piece of mail, RCM will scan the outside of the package or envelope and notify you of its existence via email or through the RCM website. You can choose to have the inside of the package scanned, and then either have the item forwarded to you (singly or grouped with other mail), or shredded and recycled.

An example of your RCM mailbox:

John Smith
RCM# 1234
14525 SW Millikan Way
Beaverton, OR 97005

Pricing

Basic pricing is $2.50 per month + $.10 per mail piece and $0.95 per package. RCM charges extra fees for forwarding, scanning ($10.-$.20 per page), shredding ($0.1 per ounce) and archiving. Link

Team

Ron Wiener, Founder, Chairman and CEO
Michael Miles, P.E., Director of Automation Technology
Brett Prochaska, Director of Software Development
Len A. Bayles, Chief Utility Player - Engineering
David L. Richardson, Director of Operations
Jeff Evans, Director of Marketing
Link