E-Postal News
Issue no. 101
Date: March 18-22, 2002
EPN 101-01 Deutsche Post Debuts Secure Online Document Delivery
Deutsche Post Signtrust GmbH, the digital signature subsidiary
of Deutsche Post, has expanded its product portfolio
with new offerings that include a secure online document delivery
service.
The highlights of the new line, which debuted at the CeBIT on
Wednesday, are Signtrust Status and Signtrust Contract.
Signtrust Status is a secure e-mail and electronic document
delivery service that can be integrated with Microsoft Outlook or
Lotus Notes through a plug-in.
Signtrust Status comes with five key security features critical
to a secure messaging service – confidentiality, authentication,
data integrity, non-repudiation and tracking. The service incorpo-rates
an electronic postmark that documents the message’s dis-patch
and provides legally binding confirmation of the date and
time each message was sent.
Pricing is based on the number of messages sent.
Signtrust Status, which is supposed to meet the stringent
requirements of the German Digital Signature Act, runs on
Windows 95, 98, Me, NT, 2000 or XP systems.
Signtrust Contract, the other new product, is designed to
allow legally binding contracts to be executed in e-commerce
transactions.
The post claims that the Signtrust Contract software can be
easily integrated into an online store. When buyers click on the
order button, the sales contract is displayed in a viewer with
information on the contents of the shopping basket, shipping
address, payment method and any other information that the
vendor may specify.
The customer signs the contract by using a signature card and
a PIN number.
“The main effect of the greater security will be the ability to buy
high-priced goods like cameras and to enter into sensitive con-sumer
contracts with banks and insurance companies online,”
Deutsche Post Signtrust CEO Fritz Höring said. “The buyer is
identified beyond all doubt. The combination of a personal signa-ture
card and a secure PIN means misuse is virtually impossible.”
The post expects applications such as Signtrust Contract to give
digital signatures a better chance at mass-market acceptance.
EPN 101-02 GlobalePost Project Stalled; Faces Uncertain Future
GlobalePost, the joint initiative of a bunch of postal organiza-tions
including the Universal Postal Union (UPU), the US
Postal Service, the Australia Post, the Swiss Post, Japan Post,
Post Danmark, Sweden Post and Portugal Post, is finding it dif-ficult
getting off the ground.
The ambitious project has been focused on building a guaran-teed
delivery-and-payment service targeted at Internet and cata-log
merchants looking to extend their cross-border selling
opportunities.
GlobalePost was designed to leverage the retail postal network
by letting customers pre-pay for their purchases at their local
post office or on delivery. Merchants were expected to pay the
postal organizations for shipping and collecting.
The grand design was to build a central gateway connecting
the posts, the merchants and the financial institutions and man-age
the transactions end-to-end.
However, the enthusiasm of some of the stakeholders for the
GlobalePost project is currently not as high as it was. Having
burnt their fingers on hastily conceived online projects, the gen-eral
interest level of some of the participants in GlobalePost and
other e-commerce projects may have waned. Their priorities
have also changed.
Plans for a pilot to enable customers in Europe to order prod-ucts
from US online merchants and pay through the GlobalePost
service seem to have been abandoned. The UPU says that the
pilot has been “put on hold.”
Scheduled for the end of 2001, the pilot project was supposed
to use Swiss Post’s fulfillment platform as its technical infra-structure.
In fact, the pilot was originally scheduled to take place
between June and September but was postponed once before.
UPU e-business program manager Steve Gray is pessimistic
about GlobalePost’s prospects.
He says the perspective of some of the stakeholders invested
in the project has changed.
Currently, the various stakeholders have put out an RFP for a
preliminary market study on the project’s viability. Gray says
responses to the RFP are being evaluated, but there’s no guaran-tee
the study will be done.
A decision on whether to do the study will be made next month
at a meeting of the UPU’s postal operations council. Even if the
preliminary study is done, there’s no guarantee that it will lead
anywhere.
GlobalePost’s uncertain fate is no surprise since stakeholders
have publicly voiced skepticism that anything would ever come
out of it.
A few months ago, YellowWorld CEO Gerhard Schwab expressed
doubts about the project based on the decision-making process that
he’d witnessed over the course of several months.
EPN 101-03 Has Pitney Killed the emailAngel?
It looks like postage meter maven Pitney Bowes’ docSense
unit may have quietly put its emailAngel e-mail correction
and forwarding service to sleep.
The emailAngel.com web site has disappeared and Pitney
has stopped listing emailAngel as an offering in its B2B, B2C
and B2E communications portfolio.
Sources say Pitney pulled the plug on it recently.
To bury the market’s disappointing response to emailAngel,
Pitney now brashly claims it never launched the service or
had a live product. It says it was just a “trial balloon.”
However, brochures and publicity materials described
emailAngel as a product available to customers, not a pilot.
“email Angel...is ready to assist online businesses with their
email deliveries,” a Pitney brochure said, giving the lie to its
claim that the thing was never launched.
In fact, contrary to Pitney’s claims that it was all just a mar-keting
concept, the company actually trumpeted its ability to
offer emailAngel as licensed software, hosted application or a
combination of both.
Pitney says emailAngel is currently being evaluated and
hasn’t been discontinued. It says it’s doing market research
and that future options could include a partnership with other
companies with an interest in e-mail.
Targeted at postal outfits among others, Pitney touted the
corporate e-mail correction and forwarding service as a “rev-olutionary”
offering that resolved the problem of undeliver-able
e-mail. Basically, it let web users register their old and
new e-mail address with a trusted third party.
With e-mail churn put at around 25%, undeliverable e-mail
supposedly imposes a heavy burden on businesses and
emailAngel was designed to reduce those costs.
Pitney was actively pitching emailAngel to the posts, two of
which supposedly evinced keen interest. The posts were con-sidered
well suited to handling e-mail changes since they
already provide physical change-of-address services.
To attract postal organizations to offer the product, Pitney
promised emailAngel would help them build new revenue
streams and customer loyalty. Pitney’s brochures described it
as “a perfect fit for postal organizations.” To make the propo-sition
more attractive, Pitney was willing to let the post deploy
emailAngel under their own brands.
Pitney developed an interesting business model to sell
emailAngel. Customers were to register their change of e-mail
address with a postal authority to enable e-mail forwarding.
The posts could then use that database of e-mail addresses
to give businesses a way to forward undelivered mail for a
small fee.
There were other revenue opportunities as well. For
instance, postal organizations could strike revenue-sharing
partnerships with credit card firms for the database and sell
correct e-mail addresses to businesses with the customers’
permission.
Postal outfits implementing emailAngel were supposed to
benefit from added web traffic to cross-sell and up-sell other
products. For consumers, the benefits were two-fold: assured
message receipt and the comforting knowledge that their e-mail
address was lodged in a permission-based network that
maintained their privacy.
Besides postal outfits, Pitney peddled a version of emailAngel
to corporations.
Apparently, the business model didn’t work. Sources say
businesses had a lackluster response.
Pitney acknowledged that it had signed no business cus-tomers
for emailAngel.
It’s not clear how much money Pitney lost on the venture
but company executives previously claimed that several hun-dred
thousand dollars had been poured into the program.
Pitney wouldn’t discuss its investment. While the emailAngel
idea originated with Pitney, its development was outsourced
to a software house in faraway Bangalore.
Sources say that Pitney may re-examine emailAngel and try
to revive it under a different business model.
emailAngel was the brainchild of Douglas Quine, a well-regarded
product guru in Pitney’s docSense e-bill unit.
Unlike its postage meter monopoly, Pitney’s online track
record has been spotty. emailAngel is its second online casu-alty.
Pitney dropped its iSend secure document delivery ser-vice
a few months ago, presumably because it couldn’t sell
the stuff.
Pitney is continuing with its D3 e-billing offering and its
ClickStamp Internet postage. Giga recently rated docSense the
leader among 19 e-presentment and e-payment vendors.
EPN 101-04 Japan Post To Debut Online Payments
Japan’s Postal Services Agency plans to introduce a service
this month that’ll let its savings depositors instantly pay for
their online purchases.
To facilitate the e-transactions, the post has reportedly signed
agreements with airlines, brokerages and electronic appliance
stores that sell on the Internet such as Japan Airlines, All Nippon
Airways, Bic Camera, Nomura Securities and Aoyama Trading.
The post faces competition from private-sector banks that
offer similar services.
EPN 101-05 E-Mail Beats Snail Mail
E-mail has overtaken the Royal Mail in its domestic market,
according to Internet measurement firm NetValue, which
found that 550 million e-mails were sent and received by UK
homes in January compared to 258 million letters. NetValue’s
study also reveals that UK households lead Europe in e-mail
usage, sending 170 million more messages than the French and
185 million more than the Germans a month.
EPN 101-06 Online Messaging, Gartner Says
Market researcher Gartner Inc says the US Postal Service’s
decision to abandon the secure online messaging services
business doesn’t indicate a shrinking secure e-mail market.
On the contrary, according to Gartner analyst Joyce Graff, USPS’
exit “demonstrates that this highly competitive market is still
searching for the appropriate architecture and business model.”
Gartner says that enterprises that require high-volume mes-saging
aren’t comfortable with web-based services since the
process of sending a message differs from their usual process.
The USPS recently killed its PosteCS secure online messaging
service saying that it didn’t meet its expectations. Apparently
adoption rates were lower than anticipated.
According to Graff, the post could not evolve PosteCS to meet
business requirements or customize it to the needs of potential
buyers. “Instead, it has followed a ‘one size fits all’ vision, and
the market has not yet arrived there,” Graff claims.
In her view, vendors such as PostX and NetDelivery do a bet-ter
job of meeting market needs by customizing their products.
Canada Post’s epost venture is using NetDelivery’s platform.
Graff characterized USPS’ move to drop PosteCS as a prudent
decision since secure e-mail was outside of its core competency.
EPN 101-07 MessageOne Gets More Dough; Debuts E-mail Management Scheme
MessageOne has raised $10 million in third-round funding
taking its total backing to $18 million.
The two-year-old Austin, Texas start-up founded by Adam Dell, also
introduced its enterprise messaging management system lately.
The new financing came from RRE Ventures, StarVest Partners
and Adam Dell’s Impact Venture Partners. Adam is the brother of
Dell Computer CEO Michael Dell. Prior funding came from Impact
Ventures.
Dubbed MessageView, the start-up’s e-mail management sys-tem
is targeted at the Global 2000. It is supposed to combine his-torical
reporting with real-time monitoring and alerts to help
firms avoid or fix problems in their messaging environment before
they become serious and hamper business. MessageView monitors
e-mail servers, anti-virus software and wireless e-mail servers.
In the first rev, the widgetry supports Microsoft Exchange 5.5
and Exchange 2000, anti-virus software from McAfee, Trend Micro
and Sybari and the Research in Motion Blackberry Enterprise
Server.
Pricing is based on a per-seat basis and starts at $2.
Anne Perlman is MessageOne CEO. She used to be CEO of Moai
Technologies and before that VP of marketing at the Compaq-acquired Tandem Computers.
The start-up claims DuPont PhotoMasks and Vignette have
gone live with MessageView. Six other beta customers are supposedly converting to live implementations.
Issue no. 101
Date: March 18-22, 2002
EPN 101-01 Deutsche Post Debuts Secure Online Document Delivery
Deutsche Post Signtrust GmbH, the digital signature subsidiary
of Deutsche Post, has expanded its product portfolio
with new offerings that include a secure online document delivery
service.
The highlights of the new line, which debuted at the CeBIT on
Wednesday, are Signtrust Status and Signtrust Contract.
Signtrust Status is a secure e-mail and electronic document
delivery service that can be integrated with Microsoft Outlook or
Lotus Notes through a plug-in.
Signtrust Status comes with five key security features critical
to a secure messaging service – confidentiality, authentication,
data integrity, non-repudiation and tracking. The service incorpo-rates
an electronic postmark that documents the message’s dis-patch
and provides legally binding confirmation of the date and
time each message was sent.
Pricing is based on the number of messages sent.
Signtrust Status, which is supposed to meet the stringent
requirements of the German Digital Signature Act, runs on
Windows 95, 98, Me, NT, 2000 or XP systems.
Signtrust Contract, the other new product, is designed to
allow legally binding contracts to be executed in e-commerce
transactions.
The post claims that the Signtrust Contract software can be
easily integrated into an online store. When buyers click on the
order button, the sales contract is displayed in a viewer with
information on the contents of the shopping basket, shipping
address, payment method and any other information that the
vendor may specify.
The customer signs the contract by using a signature card and
a PIN number.
“The main effect of the greater security will be the ability to buy
high-priced goods like cameras and to enter into sensitive con-sumer
contracts with banks and insurance companies online,”
Deutsche Post Signtrust CEO Fritz Höring said. “The buyer is
identified beyond all doubt. The combination of a personal signa-ture
card and a secure PIN means misuse is virtually impossible.”
The post expects applications such as Signtrust Contract to give
digital signatures a better chance at mass-market acceptance.
EPN 101-02 GlobalePost Project Stalled; Faces Uncertain Future
GlobalePost, the joint initiative of a bunch of postal organiza-tions
including the Universal Postal Union (UPU), the US
Postal Service, the Australia Post, the Swiss Post, Japan Post,
Post Danmark, Sweden Post and Portugal Post, is finding it dif-ficult
getting off the ground.
The ambitious project has been focused on building a guaran-teed
delivery-and-payment service targeted at Internet and cata-log
merchants looking to extend their cross-border selling
opportunities.
GlobalePost was designed to leverage the retail postal network
by letting customers pre-pay for their purchases at their local
post office or on delivery. Merchants were expected to pay the
postal organizations for shipping and collecting.
The grand design was to build a central gateway connecting
the posts, the merchants and the financial institutions and man-age
the transactions end-to-end.
However, the enthusiasm of some of the stakeholders for the
GlobalePost project is currently not as high as it was. Having
burnt their fingers on hastily conceived online projects, the gen-eral
interest level of some of the participants in GlobalePost and
other e-commerce projects may have waned. Their priorities
have also changed.
Plans for a pilot to enable customers in Europe to order prod-ucts
from US online merchants and pay through the GlobalePost
service seem to have been abandoned. The UPU says that the
pilot has been “put on hold.”
Scheduled for the end of 2001, the pilot project was supposed
to use Swiss Post’s fulfillment platform as its technical infra-structure.
In fact, the pilot was originally scheduled to take place
between June and September but was postponed once before.
UPU e-business program manager Steve Gray is pessimistic
about GlobalePost’s prospects.
He says the perspective of some of the stakeholders invested
in the project has changed.
Currently, the various stakeholders have put out an RFP for a
preliminary market study on the project’s viability. Gray says
responses to the RFP are being evaluated, but there’s no guaran-tee
the study will be done.
A decision on whether to do the study will be made next month
at a meeting of the UPU’s postal operations council. Even if the
preliminary study is done, there’s no guarantee that it will lead
anywhere.
GlobalePost’s uncertain fate is no surprise since stakeholders
have publicly voiced skepticism that anything would ever come
out of it.
A few months ago, YellowWorld CEO Gerhard Schwab expressed
doubts about the project based on the decision-making process that
he’d witnessed over the course of several months.
EPN 101-03 Has Pitney Killed the emailAngel?
It looks like postage meter maven Pitney Bowes’ docSense
unit may have quietly put its emailAngel e-mail correction
and forwarding service to sleep.
The emailAngel.com web site has disappeared and Pitney
has stopped listing emailAngel as an offering in its B2B, B2C
and B2E communications portfolio.
Sources say Pitney pulled the plug on it recently.
To bury the market’s disappointing response to emailAngel,
Pitney now brashly claims it never launched the service or
had a live product. It says it was just a “trial balloon.”
However, brochures and publicity materials described
emailAngel as a product available to customers, not a pilot.
“email Angel...is ready to assist online businesses with their
email deliveries,” a Pitney brochure said, giving the lie to its
claim that the thing was never launched.
In fact, contrary to Pitney’s claims that it was all just a mar-keting
concept, the company actually trumpeted its ability to
offer emailAngel as licensed software, hosted application or a
combination of both.
Pitney says emailAngel is currently being evaluated and
hasn’t been discontinued. It says it’s doing market research
and that future options could include a partnership with other
companies with an interest in e-mail.
Targeted at postal outfits among others, Pitney touted the
corporate e-mail correction and forwarding service as a “rev-olutionary”
offering that resolved the problem of undeliver-able
e-mail. Basically, it let web users register their old and
new e-mail address with a trusted third party.
With e-mail churn put at around 25%, undeliverable e-mail
supposedly imposes a heavy burden on businesses and
emailAngel was designed to reduce those costs.
Pitney was actively pitching emailAngel to the posts, two of
which supposedly evinced keen interest. The posts were con-sidered
well suited to handling e-mail changes since they
already provide physical change-of-address services.
To attract postal organizations to offer the product, Pitney
promised emailAngel would help them build new revenue
streams and customer loyalty. Pitney’s brochures described it
as “a perfect fit for postal organizations.” To make the propo-sition
more attractive, Pitney was willing to let the post deploy
emailAngel under their own brands.
Pitney developed an interesting business model to sell
emailAngel. Customers were to register their change of e-mail
address with a postal authority to enable e-mail forwarding.
The posts could then use that database of e-mail addresses
to give businesses a way to forward undelivered mail for a
small fee.
There were other revenue opportunities as well. For
instance, postal organizations could strike revenue-sharing
partnerships with credit card firms for the database and sell
correct e-mail addresses to businesses with the customers’
permission.
Postal outfits implementing emailAngel were supposed to
benefit from added web traffic to cross-sell and up-sell other
products. For consumers, the benefits were two-fold: assured
message receipt and the comforting knowledge that their e-mail
address was lodged in a permission-based network that
maintained their privacy.
Besides postal outfits, Pitney peddled a version of emailAngel
to corporations.
Apparently, the business model didn’t work. Sources say
businesses had a lackluster response.
Pitney acknowledged that it had signed no business cus-tomers
for emailAngel.
It’s not clear how much money Pitney lost on the venture
but company executives previously claimed that several hun-dred
thousand dollars had been poured into the program.
Pitney wouldn’t discuss its investment. While the emailAngel
idea originated with Pitney, its development was outsourced
to a software house in faraway Bangalore.
Sources say that Pitney may re-examine emailAngel and try
to revive it under a different business model.
emailAngel was the brainchild of Douglas Quine, a well-regarded
product guru in Pitney’s docSense e-bill unit.
Unlike its postage meter monopoly, Pitney’s online track
record has been spotty. emailAngel is its second online casu-alty.
Pitney dropped its iSend secure document delivery ser-vice
a few months ago, presumably because it couldn’t sell
the stuff.
Pitney is continuing with its D3 e-billing offering and its
ClickStamp Internet postage. Giga recently rated docSense the
leader among 19 e-presentment and e-payment vendors.
EPN 101-04 Japan Post To Debut Online Payments
Japan’s Postal Services Agency plans to introduce a service
this month that’ll let its savings depositors instantly pay for
their online purchases.
To facilitate the e-transactions, the post has reportedly signed
agreements with airlines, brokerages and electronic appliance
stores that sell on the Internet such as Japan Airlines, All Nippon
Airways, Bic Camera, Nomura Securities and Aoyama Trading.
The post faces competition from private-sector banks that
offer similar services.
EPN 101-05 E-Mail Beats Snail Mail
E-mail has overtaken the Royal Mail in its domestic market,
according to Internet measurement firm NetValue, which
found that 550 million e-mails were sent and received by UK
homes in January compared to 258 million letters. NetValue’s
study also reveals that UK households lead Europe in e-mail
usage, sending 170 million more messages than the French and
185 million more than the Germans a month.
EPN 101-06 Online Messaging, Gartner Says
Market researcher Gartner Inc says the US Postal Service’s
decision to abandon the secure online messaging services
business doesn’t indicate a shrinking secure e-mail market.
On the contrary, according to Gartner analyst Joyce Graff, USPS’
exit “demonstrates that this highly competitive market is still
searching for the appropriate architecture and business model.”
Gartner says that enterprises that require high-volume mes-saging
aren’t comfortable with web-based services since the
process of sending a message differs from their usual process.
The USPS recently killed its PosteCS secure online messaging
service saying that it didn’t meet its expectations. Apparently
adoption rates were lower than anticipated.
According to Graff, the post could not evolve PosteCS to meet
business requirements or customize it to the needs of potential
buyers. “Instead, it has followed a ‘one size fits all’ vision, and
the market has not yet arrived there,” Graff claims.
In her view, vendors such as PostX and NetDelivery do a bet-ter
job of meeting market needs by customizing their products.
Canada Post’s epost venture is using NetDelivery’s platform.
Graff characterized USPS’ move to drop PosteCS as a prudent
decision since secure e-mail was outside of its core competency.
EPN 101-07 MessageOne Gets More Dough; Debuts E-mail Management Scheme
MessageOne has raised $10 million in third-round funding
taking its total backing to $18 million.
The two-year-old Austin, Texas start-up founded by Adam Dell, also
introduced its enterprise messaging management system lately.
The new financing came from RRE Ventures, StarVest Partners
and Adam Dell’s Impact Venture Partners. Adam is the brother of
Dell Computer CEO Michael Dell. Prior funding came from Impact
Ventures.
Dubbed MessageView, the start-up’s e-mail management sys-tem
is targeted at the Global 2000. It is supposed to combine his-torical
reporting with real-time monitoring and alerts to help
firms avoid or fix problems in their messaging environment before
they become serious and hamper business. MessageView monitors
e-mail servers, anti-virus software and wireless e-mail servers.
In the first rev, the widgetry supports Microsoft Exchange 5.5
and Exchange 2000, anti-virus software from McAfee, Trend Micro
and Sybari and the Research in Motion Blackberry Enterprise
Server.
Pricing is based on a per-seat basis and starts at $2.
Anne Perlman is MessageOne CEO. She used to be CEO of Moai
Technologies and before that VP of marketing at the Compaq-acquired Tandem Computers.
The start-up claims DuPont PhotoMasks and Vignette have
gone live with MessageView. Six other beta customers are supposedly converting to live implementations.
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