WASHINGTON — Encouraged by a 90 percent customer approval rating, the U.S. Postal Service today announced that it would make the recent Intelligent Mail University Symposiums available through its RIBBS website: ribbs.usps.gov.

About 90 percent of the 1,000 attending the webinar symposiums rated the sessions as “Excellent” or “Good,” according to Pritha Mehra, vice president, Business Mail Entry and Payment Technologies.

The Postal Service facilitated the four symposiums — in Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and New York — to help its business customers prepare for the launch of Intelligent Mail services on May 18.

“We credit the success of the symposiums to so many of our customers whose input helped drive the content,” said Mehra. “We look forward to our continued working relationship with the industry through implementation and beyond.”

By signing up for the services, and depending on the specific services selected, business mailers can receive automated address correction, enabling greater returns on investment for their direct mail campaigns. When combined with print production and logistics systems, Intelligent Mail services will provide mailers with the ability to track their mailings in the portion of the supply chain prior to the Postal Service. For example, they’ll know whether the mailing is still at the printer’s facility or has been inducted into the postal network.

The key technology behind the services is the Intelligent Mail barcode for letters and flats (large envelopes, magazines, catalogs, and circulars). The barcode’s enhanced data capacity allows it to hold all routing and sorting information as well as to provide each mail piece with the ability to be identified uniquely within a mailing.

The Postal Service also has developed Intelligent Mail barcodes for trays, sacks, and containers.

“The ability to track the status of a mailing will help business mailers respond more quickly and more accurately when their customers call,” said Tom Day, senior vice president, Intelligent Mail and Address Quality. “Since the Intelligent Mail barcode also enables the tracking of envelopes from a recipient back to the mailer, it can help finance departments monitor and predict payments more easily.”

Intelligent Mail University Symposiums Receive High Scores

Tokyo based creative agency SET is adding style to the standard QR code. Teaming up with Takashi Murakami, they have created a custom code that mixes one of Takashi Murakami characters with the Louis Vuitton pattern.

 

Toronto-headquartered National Post Tuesday said it has become the first North American newspaper to adopt a 2D barcode system that allows readers to scan the printed paper with a mobile device to get updated digital content.

The National Post is using Scanbuy’s ScanLife client application and Code Management Platform for the system.

Readers with data-enabled camera phones, such as a BlackBerry, can scan the or take a snapshot of the digital-looking barcode found alongside a Post story. Updated content from the newspaper’s mobile site is then uploaded to the mobile device.

“The brilliant thing about ScanLife is how it ties our newspaper and our mobile site together,” Post Vice-President/Digital Media Jonathan Harris said in a statement. “With ScanLife, our readers can use their smartphones to dig deeper into the story on our mobile site while they are reading the paper. At the Post, we are always searching for new and innovative ways that make it easier for our readers to connect with our stories. This new technology helps us do just that.”

The ScanLife application can be downloaded for free from www.getscanlife.com, and used to take a photo or scan any 2D barcode in the Post.

In addition to updating news, the Post said the 2D barcode technology could be used for contests and advertisements.

“We are very excited that a national daily newspaper is embracing this technology to seamlessly connect one media platform to another,” Scanbuy CEO Jonathan Bulkeley said in the announcement. “This represents a more holistic approach to media which we believe 2D barcode technology can help facilitate.”

You might not know what the new generation of bar codes looks like: a blocky collection of little pixel-like squares within a larger square in a manner that faintly resembles static on a television set. Even if you’ve noticed one, it might still be surprising to learn that they’re kind of trendy, which is a strange thing for a bar code to be. Yet when a scarf that prominently includes such a pattern appeared a few months ago, it quickly made the blog rounds, and was often labeled “geek chic.”

Read complete Style Decoder in the New York Times