UK's Royal Mail Launches First Intelligent Stamps

An anonymous reader writes "The Royal Mail on Friday issued what it called the world's first 'intelligent stamps,' designed to interact with smartphones using image-recognition technology. The Royal Mail's latest special-issue stamps, devoted to historic British railways, are designed to launch specially developed online content when a user snaps them using an image-recognition application available on iPhone or Android handsets. 'This is the first time a national postal service has used this kind of technology on their stamps and we're very excited to be bringing intelligent stamps to the nation's post,' a Royal Mail spokesman said in a statement. 'Intelligent stamps mark the next step in the evolution of our stamps, bringing them firmly into the 21st century.'"

Waste of cash

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish they'd spend on the money on something else. Like - I don't know - perhaps inproving their piss poor service, delivering my post before noon etc etc etc etc

Personally...

[gilesjuk]

I just wish they would stop wasting money on such gimmicks and actually bother to deliver the mail correctly. I received someone's birthday card a while back, the house number was a match for mine but the rest of the address wasn't close. Was in the same town of course, but rather than ruin someone's birthday I hand delivered the card myself.

So to sum up, the Royal Mail can't even be bothered to deliver until after noon and it seems like they now are employing people who can't even be bothered to deliver to the correct address.

But hey, they have "cool" stamps.

What is this supposed to accomplish?

[NivenMK1]

Making an over-glorified bar code analog into a stamp which allows one to easily be linked to content is just a worthless ploy to generate revenue, as each time a poor yob scans one, they will likely make more off the resulting page hit (Thanks Advertising!) than they will from the sale of the stamp less the cost of delivering the letter.

I would wager that if someone has a phone which is capable of reading these "intelligent" stamps, they most likely know how to get more information than they wanted dealing with conceivable topic which a stamp could express in less time than installing the software to read the stamp.

Just the name screams marketing ploy and literally adds nothing to an infrequent, inconvenient, but occasional legally useful way of sending typed or written communication.