Sweden Replacing Stamps with SMS System
Stamp collecting is about to get a whole lot more interesting as Sweden has just announced a system that could eliminate the stamp altogether. TIME magazine reports that the Swedish postal service, Posten AB, is looking to launch a system that would see people pay for postage for letters and packages via text message.
The system, not expected to be in operation before the summer, will apply to packages and letters weighing under 4.4 pounds, or 2 kilograms. It's unclear whether Sweden has plans to implement a similar system for larger packages. People will have to text the postal service to pay for their postage and will receive a code that they're then supposed to write on their parcel or letter.
Denmark is also looking to put a similar system in place and will begin testing it out in just a couple of weeks, on April 1.
okey no more stamps now if only we culd use i dont know lets say E-mail an invention done 30 years ago
but the main form of billing and paiments are still in sweden done by papper.
It will only be an alternative method for paying, there will still be stamps.
Although I have used a single for a year now. All my bills are paid online.
Does someone key in the code to a system to validate it and stop it being used again? Surely that must take a lot of work is there some OCR software - and what if it is written badly? What if someone pinched my code? Could you get away with using one code to post two items posted in say two different mailboxes on the same day?
Wait. What percentage of Europeans does not have acces to mobile phones in one way or another? Nearly zero, especially in Sweden, one of Europe's richest and most prosperous countries.
This is Europe. Not China. Not the southern US.
Most of the mail in Sweden is sorted by machines doing OCR already, adding another field to search would probably be easy.
Regarding pinching the code, hopefully the sorting system checks for that kind of "errors". And pinching the code, it's about the same as stealing a stamp.
You're joking, right? Look at the size of a stamp. How many trees do you think this saves? Not many. The server farms required to generate, store, and send all these postage codes need energy to run. All you are really doing here is offsetting the use of trees with other sources. This isn't saving anything. Trees are also a renewable resource.
This is the complete opposite of going green.
Online billing? Great! That saves tons of paper. A single invoice with envelope will make hundreds of stamps.
think again
try go chop down some wood and make one, and you will quickly find out that there is a process involved when making stamps
some stamps has been used together with plastic=oil=bad or chemicals...etc
and how do you think that paper get stuck to an envelope?
however, I believe the sms thing is simply the next logical step, no more, no less.
This is hilarious! Tom's, really, you can devise a method of preventing this spam. Don't allow newbies to post links for, like, two weeks. When links are posted, check them out before the post is saved. Lastly ...deny posts about Air Jordans of free shipping. If a post from a regular doesn't go through, we'll understand.
if you think you have big brother beside you, you must be sorely mistaken.
just relax man. you are too wound up