Royal Mail Launches First Intelligent Stamps

The Royal Mail on Friday issued what it called the world’s first “intelligent stamps”, designed to interact with smartphones using image-recognition technology.

The Royal Mail’s latest special-issue stamps, devoted to historic British railways, are designed to launch specially developed online content when a user snaps them using an image-recognition application available on iPhone or Android handsets.

“This is the first time a national postal service has used this kind of technology on their stamps and we’re very excited to be bringing intelligent stamps to the nation’s post,” a Royal Mail spokesman said in a statement. “Intelligent stamps mark the next step in the evolution of our stamps, bringing them firmly into the 21st century.”

The Night Mail

To interact with the stamp, a user needs to download the Junaio application, available from the iPhone’s App Store or the Android Market, the Royal Mail said. This can then be used to snap an image of the stamp, which triggers a short film of English character actor Bernard Cribbins reading W H Auden’s poem, “The Night Mail”.

The poem was originally written for the 1936 documentary The Night Mail, about the London-to-Glasgow postal train.

Cribbins reads the poem standing in the “Old Gentleman’s Saloon”, a classic rail carriage used in the 1970 film The Railway Children. The carriage is now placed at Waterloo Station, where it forms part of the set of a stage version of the film.

The Royal Mail said its “Special Stamp” programme has been in operation for nearly 50 years, commemorating events and anniversaries pertinent to British heritage and life, with all stamp designs being personally approved by Her Majesty the Queen before being printed. The body estimates that there are 2.5 million stamp collectors in the UK.

Two-dimensional matrix barcodes are another example of the use of image recognition to link smartphones to online content. The barcodes appear as a two-dimensional grid of black and white squares, often encoding a web address; when scanned by a smartphone the web address launches a page in the handset’s browser. Microsoft released a beta version of it’s ‘Tag’ service early last year.