“Someone is going to go postal on the Geico gecko. Every week it seems another unsolicited solicitation from the insurance company best known for its Aussie-accented pitch-lizard appears in my mailbox along with stacks of credit card offers, catalogs, nonprofits’ pleas for money, fly-by-nights wanting to refinance my mortgage and reams of garish advertising flyers,” Todd Woody reports for Forbes.
“But now, instead of hauling a pile of paper directly from the mailbox to the recycling bin, I pull out my iPhone and fire up a new app called MailStop [free]. I snap a photo of the Geico envelope, tap the screen and beam it to Catalog Choice, a Berkeley, Calif. startup that then notifies the advertising-crazed insurer to take me off its mailing list,” Woody reports. “Within a few minutes I’ve performed a digital jujitsu on the junk mail in my mailbox. In other words, all the mail in my mailbox.”
Woody reports, “The $51 billion direct mail industry and the U.S. Postal Service are about to get disrupted, Silicon Valley-style. The 22.5 million stop requests Catalog Choice has processed over the past five years are a mere scrap of the some 85 billion pieces of junk mail that landed in American mailboxes in 2011. But that pace could dramatically pick up as junk mail- blocking apps from Catalog Choice and competitors like PaperKarma begin to seed smart phones.”
Read more in the full article here.