Pitney Bowes is a seasoned player in the traditional mailing industry, has 36,000 employees, and offers a quite wide variety of products, typically somehow related with the mail medium paper. Since Pitney Bowes is suing zumbox, we thought that Pitney Bowes might already offer some digital mail technologies, which are comparable to zumbox. After some googling we found that Pitney Bowes announced a Virtual Mail Management Solution in February 2009, plus the current Pitney Bowes web page for this product. We did not find obviously zumbox-like products. Shedding some light on Pitney Bowes’ action is the following article in Wall Steet Journal:
Pitney Bowes invested more than $200 million in research and development in 2008, with much of that total dedicated to software products, said Bernie Gracy, vice president of strategy and new business development at Pitney Bowes.
The patents in question are:
* #7,478,140, “A System and Method for Sending Electronic Mail and Parcel Delivery Notification Using Recipient’s Identification Information”
* #6,690,773, “Recipient Control Over Aspects of Incoming Messages”
* #7,058,586, “Information Delivery System for Providing Senders with a Recipient’s Messaging Preferences.”
It will be interesting to watch for the court’s decision(s). Software patents have been causing some heated debates in the last few years. There are opinions claiming that software patents are hindering innovation and are causing problems for smaller businesses.
Motives for world wide patent cases are to recover lost or future revenue, or to prevent an erosion of traditional markets. And legal costs are typically avoided, if no return is visible. This tells us something about the potential feasibility of zumbox. Does it tell you something?
#1 by admin on May 27th, 2010
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We are not surprised by the appearance of this article.
#2 by admin on January 10th, 2011
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15 months after zumbox has been sued, Pitney Bowes now announced Volly, a “secure digital delivery service, a new cloud-based digital mail communications platform that will empower consumers to receive, view, organize, and manage bills, statements, direct marketing, catalogs, coupons and other content from multiple providers using a single application. This opt-in, consumer-focused consolidation service which also includes online bill pay, will begin to be made available to consumers in the United States in the second half of 2011.”
Overall, Volly reminds us very strongly of zumbox and more sinister minds may now rise the chicken and egg question.
http://www.zumbox.xom
http://www.volly.com/
To the best of our knowledge the lawsuit against zumbox is still pending. in May 2010 a court has granted zumbox a Motion to Stay in the patent infringement suit brought against the firm by Pitney Bowes.