Australian start-up debuts virtual post office

A tiny Australian outfit called Planetwide has launched a service to make it easier for travelers gallivanting around exotic locales to access their regular mail.

The start-up recently got two services off the ground â€" ScanMe, an electronic mail forwarding offering, and FollowMe, a traditional mail-forwarding service.

Planetwide is the brainchild of Richard Uren, who set up one of the first Internet cafes in Brisbane a few years back.

Uren says Planetwide was born after he returned from a yearlong European trip to find enormous piles of mail â€" financial notices, unpaid bills, letters from friends, junk mail and, worst of all, missing mail. During his absence, he had delegated the task of managing his mail to friends and relatives; apparently it didn't turn out the way he envisioned.

"Having done a lot of traveling, it's really a lot of hassle collecting your mail," Uren said, adding that ScanMe serves the useful purpose of alerting subscribers to urgent matters.

The fledgling's services have been in pilot with a dozen customers for a few months and Uren claims there have been no showstoppers. The pilot customers "think it's fantastic," he said.

While both services are apparently up and running, the company's current focus is on ScanMe.

With it, subscribers first have to redirect their mail to Planetwide's offices. For a monthly service fee, the company scans their mail to a text searchable PDF format and e-mails them the scans.

Customers signing up for the service also get an e-mail account at planetwide.net where their scanned messages are sent. However, they have the option of getting the scans at another e-mail address.

Planetwide stores the originals and forwards them to subscribers when they notify the company where to send them.

ScanMe is supposed to filter out junk mail. The company says that only items actually addressed to the recipients will be forwarded to them. If a subscriber receives an unscannable item, Planetwide says it'll notify him by e-mail and ask for instructions.

Uren claims ScanMe reduces the risk of identity theft because mail doesn't sit uncollected in a mailbox. Planetwide says it operates under stringent privacy policies and procedures that safeguard subscribers' confidential documents. But currently the mail scanning is done manually; the company has yet to invest in automated equipment. It's not clear if consumers will be willing to trust their personal letters to a tiny unknown outfit that manages the whole process manually. "Beyond giving our word, we can't do much more than that," Uren said.

Planetwide says it'll invest in automated mail opening, extracting and scanning once it crosses the threshold of 800- 900 customers. Uren expects to reach that milestone in about 14 months.

He boasts that ScanMe is the "Southern Hemisphere's first exclusive e-mail post service" but acknowledges that it's based on a similar thing from a San Francisco concern called PaperlessPOBox.

Citing statistics saying that over a quarter of a million Australians travel overseas for three months or more every year, Uren sees a rich opportunity in ScanMe.

Besides addressing people on extended trips, Planetwide is also looking to target the denizens living in remote parts of Australia.

Although businesses and corporate travelers can sign up for the service, Uren is currently eyeing only the consumer market. His game plan is to establish a foothold in the consumer space and then turn his attention to the corporate segment.

To promote the new services, Planetwide is teaming up with travel agents. The idea is for the agents to sell ScanMe when they sell tickets or vacations. They would get a commission. The company says it's teamed up with 12-15 travel agents so far and wants to boost that number.

ScanMe is currently priced at $14 a month for 50MB of disk space and the transmission of 50 pages of messages. Each additional page costs 19 cents.

FollowMe costs $15.40.

Besides the monthly service charges, both services have a set-up fee of $23.

Uren says he has no competition at the moment.

Planetwide expects to break even in 12 month with about 500 customers when it will approach the VCs or banks to finance its plans to address the business market.

Uren says postal organizations are definitely potential partners for his services since they "legitimize the market." Planetwide supposedly discussed the project with the Australia Post but the post gave the company the cold shoulder. "They declined to be involved because they might want to do it directly or it's too close to the services they're offering," he said. Uren says his partner Kathie Grigg and he founded Planetwide on their own nickel by selling their houses. He reckons that the venture's cost them about $103,000-$138,000 so far.

Planetwide's services are currently available only in Australia but Uren has set his sights on expanding into the UK, Europe and the US in 18-24 months.