A New Zumbox Strategic Partnership and CEO

Zumbox appoints new CEO and announces key strategic partnership

On June 10th, we announced that Donn Rappaport had been appointed CEO of Zumbox and that he was joining our Board of Directors. Additionally, Zumbox formed a strategic partnership with ALC, a company Mr. Rappaport founded more than 30 years ago.

ALC is a leading data marketing services company based in Princeton, NJ, with offices in New York, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Dallas. For the past month or so we’ve been integrating and aligning our two companies.

This partnership means many things for Zumbox including additional team members and a physical presence in key regions of the country. In particular, ALC has long-time relationships with some of the largest senders of paper mail in the U.S.

ALC and Zumbox are now working together to offer Zumbox as a paperless mail option for businesses, governments, and consumers. This new partnership and leadership is already accelerating our progress and the adoption of our paperless postal system.

Having completed our initial pilot program in the Village of New Lenox, IL, we’re now planning a first stage rollout for the fall. We’ll be providing more details through this blog and Zumbox itself.

Thanks Vernon Connecticut and Helotes Texas!

More and more cities and towns across the country are beginning to offer Zumbox as a paperless mail option to their residents.

We’re happy to learn that the Town of Vernon (Connecticut) and Helotes (Texas) are encouraging their residents to claim their Zumbox.   Most exciting is the fact that both Vernon and Helotes were not contacted by Zumbox staff – they independently found out about Zumbox and are now actively using it.

From the Helotes June / July newsletter:

To lower costs and help the environment, the City will utilize a paperless postal system to mail out quarterly newsletters and provide additional information to residents.  At this time, the newsletter will continue to be mailed in paper form, but it is our hope that residents with internet capability will opt for the paperless system.

The team here at Zumbox would like to extend a warm “welcome” to Vernon and Helotes!

Team Zumbox with Heal the Bay

As part of our participation in Earth Day 2009, a small group of the Zumbox Team pitched in to clean up the beach in Santa Monica today with Heal the Bay.

Team Zumbox

Heal the Bay

Thanks to everyone who particpated. The weather was beautiful, and we all pitched in to make the beach a safer and cleaner place to enjoy. We also learned a few things about storm runoff and how we can keep trash and other pollutants from spoiling Santa Monica Bay.

Zumbox Participates in the Earth Day Celebration

Zumbox Joins Earth Day Network and Green Apple Festival as an Earth Day 2009 Sponsor

Zumbox is proud to be a sponsor of Earth Day 2009 with Earth Day Network and Green Apple Festival. The Zumbox team is participating in volunteer activities in Santa Monica and Chicago this weekend, and we’ll be exhibiting on The National Mall in Washington, DC, on Sunday, April 19th. If you’ll be there, please come by for a visit.

Earth Day reaffirms what we already know – that we can each make a  difference by changing our daily behaviors to conserve energy and natural resources, recycle more and utilize alternative green solutions to not just save the environment, but help it thrive once again. For our part, the Zumbox postal mail system provides a more sustainable alternative to traditional paper mail.

Sponsoring the Shamrock Shuffle 8K in Chicago

Zumbox supports the Bank of America Shamrock Shuffle event this weekend in Chicago.

Zumbox is proud to sponsor the Bank of America Shamrock Shuffle 8K run in Chicago this weekend. The Zumbox team will be exhibiting in the Health & Fitness Expo, which is being held at Navy Pier, Festival Hall B, this Friday and Saturday (March 27th and 28th). If you live in the Chicago area, please stop by. We’ll have Zumbox tote bags made from recycled material for everyone who claims their Zumbox on site and supports the Shamrock Shuffle event.

We’ve been very active in the Chicago area since our February public beta launch. The towns of New Lenox and Orland Park, which are just outside Chicago, are currently transitioning their residents to our paperless postal system in order to save taxpayer dollars and reduce their environmental impact. The Shamrock Shuffle event represents our first initiative in the heart of the Windy City.

The Bank of America Shamrock Shuffle benefits a number of great charities including Team in Training, American Cancer Society, the Chicago Police Memorial Foundation.

Zumbox Furthers the Goals of Government 2.0

Zumbox opens a new channel of communications between American citizens and their government that is both secure and accountable.

“We must use all available technologies and methods to open up the federal government, creating a new level of transparency to change the way business is conducted in Washington, and giving Americans the chance to participate in government deliberations and decision-making in ways that were not possible only a few years ago.”
—From Barack Obama’s campaign platform on technology

According to Wikipedia, Government 2.0 is “an attempt to provide more effective processes for government service delivery to individuals and businesses. Integration of tools such as wikis, development of government-specific social networking sites and the use of blogs, RSS feeds and Google Maps are all helping governments provide information to people in a manner that is more immediately useful to the people concerned.”

We might consider adding Zumbox to this entry for the unique ways in which our digital postal system is “helping governments provide information to people in a manner that is more immediately useful.” Indeed, on March 3rd we announced our first government partnership with the Village of New Lenox, Illinois, and more recently the L.A. Times featured Zumbox in a cover story (Online services deliver mail without the paper) in which New Lenox Mayor Tim Baldermann was quoted.

“We are convinced [Zumbox] is the way to go,” New Lenox Mayor Tim Baldermann said. “It’s good for the environment, and it’s good for our taxpayers.” Though households currently get both regular mail and Zumbox mail, Baldermann said the town could save $120,000 a year in printing and mailing costs if everyone switched.

New Lenox is a community of about 13,000 residences, so this works out to about $9 per household per year. The cost saving potential of switching to Zumbox is clearly significant for governments, businesses, and nonprofits. So are the environmental upsides. These are two of our key value propositions. But there is much more value to be discovered when we think of Zumbox as a Government 2.0 technology.

This movement toward a more open, transparent, and accountable government followed closely on the heels of Web 2.0, and it’s given rise to new businesses, media, and nonprofits. Government 2.0 is clearly happening, and we’re thrilled to be a part of it.

Paperless Delivery, Newspapers, and the Fourth Estate

“Were it left to us to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter.” -Thomas Jefferson

Chances are your daily newspaper is struggling if not panicking. The financial crisis is pushing the entire newspaper industry to the brink, triggering a wave of dividend cuts, bankruptcies and outright closures. In Jefferson’s opinion, this ought to be cause for concern. “This matters,” writes James Warren in the Atlantic, “because of the unique role journalism plays in a democracy. So much public information and official government knowledge depends on a private business model that is now failing.”

In 2007, the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) delivered 1.3 billion newspapers to U.S. households. While that’s a lot of dead trees, it actually represents a steady decline of nearly 50% over the previous 20 years, and the economic crisis is accelerating this trend. The Rocky Mountain News published its final edition last Friday after 150 years of publication, and it’s possible that the San Francisco Chronicle could follow, becoming the largest U.S. city to lose its main daily newspaper. This has prompted the newspaper industry to take a serious look at its business model and the way it operates.

This is the context in which we announce our first newspaper partnership with 22nd Century Media, which publishes six  local papers in the Chicago area. The New Lenox Patriot is the first of these to be distributed digitally to every street address in the Village of New Lenox, Illinois, via Zumbox. You may have noticed that we added a specific tab in your Zumbox dedicated to receiving newspapers.

From The Patriot: What our partnership with Zumbox means is that you can access the same newspaper you received in your mailbox each week anytime, anywhere, as long as there is an Internet connection. How is this different than our Web site? Well, the paper in your Zumbox looks exactly like the print version. You can flip the pages the same way, but unlike our print paper, we can embed videos right into what appears in your Zumbox, and link interactive content to our Web site. Zumbox also allows you to get The Patriot — and all of your mail — even if you’re not at home. Let’s say you’re on vacation or staying at your summer home in Florida (lucky), all you have to do is log on to Zumbox with your mailing address and you can read The Patriot just as you would sitting at your kitchen table at home.

While it’s a bit premature to claim that Zumbox will save the newspaper industry, we do think Zumbox merits serious consideration as a way to distribute newspaper content (and advertising) more efficiently. After all, newspaper publishers have their subscribers’ street addresses, which means they can also send papers the their Zumboxes (the addresses are one and the same). It costs little or nothing to send electronic editions to them via Zumbox. At the very least, it gives the subscriber a choice to view the paper online or off, depending on their given circumstances. At the very most, it can give publishers a second chance, as Zumbox opens new possibilities for content delivery, personalization, and monetization.

The recent TIME magazine cover story on “How to Save Your Newspaper” makes the case that readers should be willing to offer micro-payments in exchange for quality journalism. While there is plenty of debate as to whether this is viable or not, the subscription model has not worked for websites. Zumbox significantly changes the distribution model for online content. Rather than having to deliver a person to your website, Zumbox enables the content to be delivered to the person, much as it’s been done with paper. As Warren points out, The Economist, which looks like a magazine but fancies itself a newspaper, has increased its U.S. circulation while raising prices substantially. This despite the fact that all of its content is available for free on its website. (We’re loyal print subscribers.)

We also believe that the experience of reading a newspaper online can be more valuable and engaging than simply reading an article on the newspaper’s website. A piece in DMNews describes this best:

The page-flipping technology used by digital editions may also help keep readers engaged with the product, and with ads on each page, longer than the piecemeal approach of most Web sites.

Jack Ryan [22nd Century Media founder] explained, “A lot of people, especially with local news, don’t know exactly what they’re looking for, so it’s hard to search for it. They like the serendipity of flipping through the pages and saying ‘I didn’t know that.’”

We’re clearly at the earliest stage of delivering newspapers to your Zumbox. The formats and business models for delivering content via Zumbox are certain to evolve. Whether this means newspaper publishers will adapt to the medium or entirely new media companies will be built around it is anyone’s guess. But we are confident that Zumbox provides a unique and compelling way for publishers and consumers of content to benefit from our digital home delivery platform.

While we can do little to help the Rocky Mountain News or San Francisco Chronicle at this point, there are thousands of state and local papers who are welcome to start using Zumbox as a new way to deliver the news, to keep people informed, and to further the pursuits of the Fourth Estate.

I’ve Got My Zumbox. Now What?

What to do now that you’ve claimed your Zumbox and secured it with your PIN.

Let’s start with a brief overview. For every street address in the U.S. (all 150 million) we’ve created an online mailbox (a Zumbox) from which to send and receive digital mail (100% paperless). If you have a street address, then you have a Zumbox; it simply needs to be claimed (online) and then secured (through a PIN, which is sent via USPS to your physical address). At the very least, your Zumbox contains a welcome letter from us. It’s also possible that someone has already sent you digital mail there. Because your Zumbox doesn’t have to be claimed and secured in order for mail to be sent and stored there.

That’s the basics of Zumbox. If you noticed the attention Zumbox received last week from the Wall Street Journal, CNET, U.S. News & World Report, Treehugger, Mashable, EcoGeek, Triple Pundit, EcoChildsPlay, and many others, then you can rightly assume that there have been a substantial number of Zumbox sign-ups. I’m guessing you’re among them. Now that you’ve received your PIN, the question naturally becomes, “What happens now?” Quite frankly, the activity will be somewhat quiet at first. But before you get discouraged, there are several things that can be done.

As with any new communications technology, there is a natural ramp-up period. We also know this as the chicken-and-egg problem. When e-mail was first introduced, you could only e-mail those who had an e-mail address. With Facebook, you could only friend those who had a Facebook. And with Twitter, you could only follow those who were already Twittering. The big difference here is that everyone who has a street address already has a Zumbox; it may not have been claimed and secured but it exists, and mail can be sent there…right now. Which means that people or companies who currently send paper mail can start to also send the digital version via Zumbox today. This will not only enable a seamless and orderly migration from paper to paperless, but it should also accelerate that ramp-up period.

Since Zumbox is free for all qualified mail senders, there is a significant financial incentive for companies, nonprofits, and government agencies to adopt our paperless mail solution. There are no postage fees, and the cost of integration is negligible. If you work for an organization that sends paper mail with any frequency, you can be the person responsible for introducing this efficiency and cost-saving measure…not to mention helping your organization to go green. At the risk of overreaching, I’m confident that a number of companies can reduce their printing, paper, and postage costs through Zumbox such that it can avert layoffs and save jobs. Consider that a company with one million customers, where each gets a paper statement monthly, spends about $12 million per year on those statements alone. As they say, $12 million here, $12 million there…eventually it adds up to real money.

When it comes to the value and utility of Zumbox, it is clearly weighted toward two groups: those who frequently send paper mail and those who receive paper mail daily. Chances are, you belong to the latter. However, the bulk of the action and initiative that needs to take place rests with the former. We’re certainly doing our best in that regard. In the coming weeks, though, we’ll introduce a way for you, the daily paper mail recipient, to take action and communicate your desire to go paperless. Which should further curtail the ramp-up period.

In the meantime, you can let your friends, family, and co-workers know that they have a Zumbox, that there is mail in it, and that they only need to enter their street address at Zumbox.com to claim and secure it. Provided you know their street address, you can also send a letter or postcard via Zumbox so they have something personal waiting for them when they get around to checking it. If you’re a bit more tech savvy, you can also use our HTML editor to embed rich media and video into your letter.

Yours,

Glen Ward, President

P.S. If you’re a developer or entrepreneur, you can also consider ways to build on the Zumbox platform through our API. There are tremendous possibilities to leverage what we’ve built. This is certainly something you can do now.

Zumbox is Free for All Qualified Mail Senders

We’re delighted to announce that Zumbox is now available to anyone in the U.S. who wants to use our secure paperless mail service. Zumbox has been in development for more than a year, so this is a tremendous milestone for the company. The big news, of course, is that we’re announcing today that Zumbox is for free for all qualified mail senders.

This is significant because it not only represents the first viable alternative to paper mail—and by “viable” we mean secure, accountable, efficient, and paperless—but Zumbox also enables companies, government agencies, nonprofits, and other organizations to quickly save costs while reducing their environmental impact.

We made this announcement today through the “proper channels.” I’d now like to take this opportunity to introduce you to the Zumbox blog (welcome to all) and to talk a bit more about how Zumbox works and what it means.

Zumbox truly is a platform. It represents the first secure online medium for sending and receiving digital mail. Of course, the question I typically get is, “Hasn’t this already been invented? I believe it’s called e-mail.” Though I do appreciate the subtle sarcasm, the reality is that while there is some overlap in terms of the utility, Zumbox is vastly different than e-mail. The differences are remarkably greater than the similarities, and that’s really where we find the value of Zumbox.

The Zumbox Alternative

The most striking difference is that your Zumbox is based on your actual, physical mailing address. This notion may not be entirely clear at first, since Zumbox essentially merges the physical and online worlds. It’s best to think of your digital Zumbox mail as running in parallel to your physical paper mail. They are two independent systems that do not intersect. Rather, Zumbox offers those who send you physical mail the first viable alternative to have it sent and received digitally, effectively migrating from one system to the other. Zumbox doesn’t replace or interfere with your physical, paper-based mailbox. We have no affiliation with the United States Postal Service (USPS), and claiming your Zumbox will have no affect on your current USPS mail delivery. Again, Zumbox operates independently and in parallel to the USPS. We just happen to use the same addressing method: name, street address, city, state, and zip code. This opens many new possibilities while presenting several advantages.

Suppose your dog or cat (perish the thought) goes missing. With Zumbox, you can send a notice with a photo (and video, if you like) to all of your neighbors…digitally. You don’t have to know their email addresses, and you don’t have to walk house-to-house. And since Zumbox is a closed system—mail is sent from one Zumbox to another—it provides total accountability. You know precisely where all of your Zumbox mail is coming from. If your neighbor sends an overwhelming number of missing pet notices or Bar-B-Que invites (it can happen), you can opt to block mail from that sender. In this sense, Zumbox represents a new way to communicate and connect with your community (or not).

Zumbox is also highly secure. Most companies do not send sensitive information via e-mail. You don’t get your bank statement via e-mail; you get a notification that your statement is ready to view through the bank’s secure website. You then have to login to their website to view or download your statement and pay your bill…all within that secure environment. Zumbox is a similarly secure environment, meeting or exceeding PCI, HIPAA, and BITS standards. In other words, it’s banking-level security, and we take it very seriously.

Lastly, e-mail does you no good if you don’t have someone’s e-mail address. There’s a certain irony in the fact that spammers somehow have your e-mail but people or companies from whom you might want to get electronic mail do not. These might include the schools where your children attend or the local theater. By using the street address system, Zumbox enables people to reach you through a secure, paperless medium. And unlike paper mail and e-mail, Zumbox users can easily and effectively block unwanted mail.

The Zumbox Platform

While the announcement that Zumbox is free for all qualified mail senders is good news for pet owners, it’s tremendous news for businesses, government agencies, and nonprofits. We have a number of solutions available that enable organizations of any type to seamlessly migrate their costly paper mailings to digital. As a company’s customers or a nonprofit’s supporters realize they have this option—the option to receive the same piece of mail digitally, from anywhere at anytime—the choice should be obvious. By migrating paper mail recipients to digital (via Zumbox), the cost savings on paper, printing, and postage will quickly add up.

We do feel that Zumbox is a revolutionary idea. As a platform, it represents a radical shift from the waste and inefficiency of paper mail. The transition itself, though, will largely be evolutionary. There are 150 million Zumboxes that need to be claimed and activated, and everyone has a role to play. The platform itself will continue to evolve, and we’ll use this blog to announce and discuss new developments. We look forward to engaging in a fruitful dialog with you about them.

If you live in the U.S., then you have mail waiting in your Zumbox right now. Just type in your address to check it!

Yours truly,

Glen Ward, President