Irish team is first to post with an international electronic stamp

As this month marks the 160th anniversary of the first use of the Penny Black stamp for postage, it is appropriate an Irish development team is conducting a first postal issue of its own, electronically.

Irish postal applications company, Anshe, which was recently purchased by Escher, a US founded postal technology company for an estimated $15 million, is behind the commercial development of an electronic franking system for the Singapore post office network.

Last Friday it posted 7,500 letters bearing a distinctively coloured electronic stamp to the postal organisations in every country worldwide. Although currently available within the domestic US market, this is the first time the electronic frank has been made available to an international audience.

Not only does the electronic franking system offer an alternative to the traditionally costly franking machine for small and medium-sized enterprises, it also features an ingenious means of document authentication.

Each envelope carries a small digital barcode, or electronic indicia, featuring unique component details of a snapshot of a section of that envelope's makeup. This information is different on every envelope, and operates exactly like a fingerprint test. Recipients can scan a handheld device over the document to establish its authenticity.

According to Escher vice-president of sales and marketing, and Anshe co-founder, Mr Martin McAdam, applications of this technology could extend to a range of documents which can be easily forged, including identity cards, concert tickets, and vehicle registration documents.

"Where traditionally the company seal is applied to physical documents, this is an electronic solution. Using this technology we can tie the information embodied on a document to that exact document," he says.

The technology enables corporate customers to offer attractive designs, corporate branding and adverts on envelopes, as well as providing security, and convenience.

Escher, which is a member of the MIT Media Lab's Things That Think consortium, was established to solely develop technologies for the postal industry.

Anshe was founded by three former employees of An Post, Mr McAdam, Mr Liam Church and Ms Fionnuala Higgins in June 1998. Its mandate was to develop commercial applications for the global postal industry in the Internet era. Since it was acquired by Escher, the 30-strong Irish development team has been working to commercialise Escher's core technologies and it now plans to deploy them through the international postal network.

According to Mr McAdam the Singapore electronic franking initiative is Escher's first foray into the Far East, and it plans to shortly establish a sales, marketing and development support presence there. Escher is also understood to be in discussions for a number of postal projects in Switzerland, Germany, Austria and Portugal.

Escher says it plans to take a listing on the US Nasdaq stock exchange within the next two years, while it expects to record a profit this year.

Escher intends to leverage its initial entry to the Singapore postal network and other markets to introduce its other products and services. This includes LetterPost, which was Anshe's flagship product. It allows users compose letters on a dedicated website, and purchase a stamp online. The letter is then transmitted to the Letterpost mail centre nearest the destination, where they are printed out and posted by the national carrier.

For the service to operate successfully on a global basis, Escher needs distribution points dotted around every major country. The best way to achieve this is in collaboration with the postal organisations in every region.

Mr McAdam envisages Escher will act as a supplier of electronic postal applications to national postal networks, rather than establishing itself as a competitor.

Escher is one of few companies addressing the lucrative electronic market outside the US.

In the US four companies are currently battling it out for dominance of the domestic e-post market. The best known is California-based E-Stamp (www.e-stamp.com) which secured United States Postal Service approval for its services within the US market last year.

E-Stamp says it has more than 13,000 customers now. The Nasdaq-listed firm suffered a significant devaluation in the recent Internet stocks shakeout when its share price fell from nearly $40 in mid-December to around $3.50 this week.