My colleague Lynda just wrote a blog post about using email to check your voicemail, and I thought it was timely to talk about Earth Class Mail, a company we are working with in the Microsoft Startup Accelerator Program. Earth Class lets you check your snail mail the way you would check email. From a consumer perspective, it's a brilliant solution for people who travel, have multiple residences, or get swamped in the deluge of mail that we all get. It lets me stay on top of my correspondence and manage it in digital format. It is also a very green earth-friendly solution as Earth Class will let you indicate which mail items you would like recycled and they take care of it. All of those catalogs, flyers and solicitations can get flagged easily from a web interface and sent to the recycling bin with the click of a button. The pieces of mail that you want opened and scanned into digital format you indicate and you can have it stored. Pieces of mail that you would like to actually hold in your hand (ie family pictures or personal mail) you can get forwarded on to you at your real address. The subscription fee is very modest and the convenience value is great.

For the enterprise mailroom, it's a no-brainer. It is secure and cost-efficient. And as telecommuting, virtual office-scenarios and companies increasingly spread their workforce into local markets, having a solution like Earth Class Mail makes perfect sense. There is no training for the workforce as well. They can check their corporate paper mail as they would their email. So there is less stress over an unopened document sitting on your desk that you miss because you had to catch the last plane out. With this service, you can "virtualize" your mailing address, having different addresses given out to different types of people or organizations so you can better manage and prioritize your mail. You can have a local address where you don't necessarily have a brick-and-mortar location. If you move often (as my parents did when I was younger), the act of forwarding your mail is less painful,... you don't have to do it and if you want something forwarded, it's as easy as changing a webform to have your mail redirected.

Years ago, I subscribed to a service from Intuit that let me direct certain bills to their Bill Pay service (phone, utility). My bills would get scanned in and I could then manage them from a web interface, get them paid directly and track them. I loved the service and wished I could do that with all of my mail. Now I can! I can track any piece of mail in a digital format with a truly impressive operation. Earth Class Mail has the ability to track every piece of mail that comes into their facility and can tell you exactly where that piece of mail happens to be (on the conveyer belt, being opened by which personnel). Everything is coded and the people handling the mail have security clearance (most are veterans), they work in a clean environment, and each piece of mail is filmed as it is being opened and scanned. It's amazing to see. Your information is safer going to the Earth Class facility than sitting in your driveway mailbox or in a box in your company's mailroom floor. The USPS cannot tell me where my mail is even when I pay to have it tracked. Earth Class mail accomplishes all of these features with a high-scale, high transaction infrastructure built on the latest Microsoft technology. They were recently a featured Microsoft partner at Post Expo 2007 in Barcelona. 

Additionally, the crack team of entrepreneurs at Earth Class were filmed for the first season of a reality series by the MOJO HD network called Startup Junkies. My team hosted the preview to the show to an audience of investors and entrepreneurs in back-to-back nights in Silicon Valley on January 16th and Redmond on January 17th. The show is a must-see; definitely worth watching for the entertainment value, the beautiful scenery of the Pacific Northwest in high-def and the tumultuous and exciting world of upstarts. Ron Weiner is a class-act and the go-get-em team make you root for them. Currently funded by Ignition Partners and the Keiretsu Forum, Earth Class Mail is definitely a timely idea bringing innovation to the dated postal system. As they say on their website, with Earth Class Mail...You’re now using Postal Mail for the 21st Century!