[thedufer]

To go a little off-topic, the jab at Outbox was horribly undeserved.

> “This company sends out humans in Priuses three days a week,” one fortysomething programmer groused to me last year.

This was a soft landing for their customers after the USPS shut down their original system of having customers have their mail forwarded. Their long-term goals were 2-fold:

1) Allow customers to easily unsubscribe from unwanted mailings (incidentally, this is why USPS wanted them shut down - junk mail constitutes most of their revenue).

2) Fix USPS - they intended to get their automatic scanning technology into USPS itself, thus saving them delivery costs on mail for anyone who signed up to receive it digitally. This could potentially save them enormous amounts of money.

They originally wanted to do this with USPS, but quickly realized that they had much better chances if they started as a private company.

Great article on Outbox: http://www.insidesources.com/outbox-vs-usps-how-the-post-off...

[wavefunction]

The folks behind Outbox were attempting something that was way more ambitious and interesting than most of the SV startups I see mentioned here, and I agree that they got a bad rap from the press and the Postal Service.