US Wants To Build 'Internet of Postal Things' 113
dcblogs writes: The U.S. Postal Service plans to spend up to $100,000 to investigate how it can utilize low cost sensors and related wireless technologies to improve the efficiency of its operations. The postal service already scans letters and parcels up to 11 times during processing, representing 1.7 trillion scans a year. It uses supercomputers to process that data. In theory, the postal service believes that everything it uses — mailboxes, vehicles, machines, or a letter carrier — could be equipped with a sensor to create what it terms the Internet of Postal Things. The Internet has not been kind to the postal service. Electronic delivery has upended the postal services business model. In 2003, it processed 49 billion pieces of single-piece first-class mail, but by 2013, that figured dropped to 22.6 billion pieces.
In other high-tech postal service news, Digital Post Australia has shut down. It was an attempt to digitize snail mail, but they didn't manage to convince enough senders that it was worth trying.
simple (Score:2, Interesting)
the fix for the postal service is simple... dont send trucks to the middle of nowhere every day. in the cities, they are actually making a profit... but because they send a truck out every day to the middle of nowhere for one letter, they lose tons of money.
Re:Reasons to use Snail Mail (Score:5, Interesting)
This also includes any letter you think your great grandchildren might want to read some day.
Really? I have a copy of every non-spam email I have sent or received in the last 31 years, all fully indexed and searchable. I have zero copies of any paper letters. For a while, I had a box of letters from my old girlfriends, but my wife tossed those a decade ago.