What the heck are they supposedly introducing as a value based service again?
In my eternal search for new and innovative ways to avoid being productive (don’t bother me when it’s Grand Slam tournament season), a new reality show on Hulu found it’s way to invade my time.
Though I generally try to avoid reality shows (unless it’s got that Gordon Ramsay dude… but only because he calls his contestants “lazy cows”) this one piqued my interest because it’s about a tech based start up company. And I find said subject extremely fascinating.
The show is called Start-Up Junkies and it’s traditional TV home is the Mojo cable network. But if you’re like me and you basically have the French Open playing in the background on your TV, your best bet is to check out all eight full episodes on Hulu for free.
In a nutshell, Start-Up Junkies is about a group of rag tag entrepreneurs who start up a brand new tech based company to interrupt the multi billion (perhaps trillion?) dollar “snail mail” industry.
How, you may ask?
By intercepting your paper mail, scanning it and re-sending this mail to you via email as a pdf type file. But not to worry, you can still get your regular important mail the old school traditional ways, this service is really for those pesky junk mail type stuff that you wouldn’t really pay any mind to anyway. I mean bills, personal letters, health clinic reports, those are things too personal to allow some stranger to open, yes? Right.
The show itself sheds a spotlight on many of Earth Class Mail’s trials, tribulations and passionate sales presentations all mostly done by company jolly guy, Ron. It’s all very fascinating and kinda inspiring. A bunch of renegades bypass working for “the man” in order to create and grow a company to become “the man” themselves. Very touching.
Here’s what I don’t get. These folks over at Earth Class Mail and Mojo don’t do a very good job of explaining quite exactly what they are offering. Is it virtual mail? A virtual PO Box? A junk mail filter that actually just ends up as more junk email for the user? And they would actually pay for this service?
Just to be clear… I’m paying you to send me more junk email? Because I most certainly wouldn’t give the green light for total strangers to open my private mails, bills, checks, packages, etc.
WTF?
The other thing that kinda miffed me was that they call their company and service Earth Class Mail, no doubt an obvious effort of trying to ride the new “green” cultural revolution that’s taken over our country. But from what I gather, this company’s service doesn’t actually eliminate any of the paper based mail that the receiver would normally get. All it does is just send the same paper mail to another address where this huge, overpriced, oversized mail sorter machine just scans the original paper mail and sends a pdf type file to the recipient’s email. Then if there is anything of interest, I may print out the email to save for later. So, basically I just used up more paper for what I think may be a pretty lame service. Al Gore would be very displeased with me.
This all leads to my “duh” questions of the week: Why would I pay someone to go through my junk mail? If this company just scans stuff that I normally wouldn’t pay any mind to anyway, why would I care that someone else take the time and efforts to scan this for me and send it to me? Isn’t that just helping the junk mail senders instead of making my life easier? Oh, and I get to pay for this privilege too? Am I missing something here? Ooh, piece of candy!
If anyone out there knows about this company or watches the show and can explain exactly what service they are selling and why it may be something, anything of value, I’d appreciate a note or message here.
Cheers.
This kid is looking more like he’s going to win four in a row in Paris.
By the way, Rafael Nadal just absolutely destroyed Verdasco 6-1, 6-0, 6-2 in the fourth round of the 2008 French Open.
cap
Posted by cap
Posted by cap
Posted by cap
