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Company to Offer Digital Postage Stamps

Device will let you print stamps along with addresses onto your envelopes.

By Rebecca Sykes, PCWorld   

E-Stamp Corporation%squots first product, E-Stamp SoHo, is a digital stamp designed to let small office/home office customers buy postage over the Internet and print it onto envelopes.

E-Stamp SoHo consists of Windows NT and Windows 95-based software, as well as a wristwatch battery-size security device that plugs into a user%squots parallel port and stores the postage value, according to Nicole Ward, vice president of marketing at E-Stamp.

Users purchase a selected amount of postage over the Internet using a credit card or check, and that value is stored in the hardware device, Ward said. Users mete out the postage onto envelopes or labels according to their preference, she said. The stamp could be printed on envelopes at the same time as the address, she said.

The stamps can be set for any amount, and can be used for both domestic and international mailings, according to Ward.

The digital stamp itself is a new design consisting of a two-dimensional bar code with both human- and machine-readable elements, Ward said. Each digital stamp is unique, so that postal machines scanning the stamps can detect whether a given stamp has been duplicated and stamped on multiple pieces of mail. In addition, the digital stamps are traceable to the lot in which they were purchased, further reducing the opportunity for fraud, she said.

E-Stamp SoHo is targeted at the 46 million U.S. small office/home office workers who currently purchase rolls of stamps for their businesses. Larger companies generally use postage meters, according to Ward.

E-Stamp is awaiting approval from the U.S. Postal Service, but the company hopes E-Stamp SOHO will ship in beta by the fourth quarter, with commercial availability in January 1998. The cost for the software and hardware has yet to be determined, but is expected to be under $300. In addition, E-Stamp hopes to offer digital stamps through partnerships with other vendors, including accounting and word processing software makers, printer vendors, and other hardware manufacturers.