Game Changing Communication Tools: Earth Class Mail & Google Voice

Recently, I have been looking into personal productivity and communication tools to upgrade our office network to be more “cloud” based and remote-hosted for inter-office flexibility & backup security. Last year, I researched quite a bit into Zimbra and IP-PBX based phone systems like trixbox and asterisk, but for whatever reason, did not feel these engaging enough to warrant the time & investment for a platform shift. This year there are two new products that have emerged as really “game changing” options for mobile professionals who frequently travel, work out of multiple offices, and need to maintain an integrated channel of communication for international business clients. The first is “Earth Class Mail” a eco-friendly mail service that will aggregate all of your snail mail to one business address, where you can choose which ones to shred, scan, or forward. The second is Google Voice, still unreleased, which will allow you to forward all of your telephone numbers to one number, voice mail, & inbox, and also to create email text transcriptions from conversations & messages.

Earth Class Mail:

“Earth Class Mail is changing how postal mail is delivered, for the betterment of individuals, businesses, national post offices, and the planet. Instead of making physical postal deliveries that are so dependent on fuel for planes and trucks, we deliver postal mail online, where people can manage it instantly, anywhere in the world. No matter where our customers are, they simply log in to their secure Earth Class Mail account to view scanned images of their mail envelopes. They then decide which items to have opened and securely scanned so they can read the contents online, and which items should be recycled, shredded, archived, or forward-shipped to them wherever they’re located – all with a few clicks of a mouse.”

Earth Class Mail has personal and small business accounts that look basically identical. The standard charge is going to be around $250 per year for a basic account, where you will have to pay extra (around $1.50) for every piece of mail scanned, and an additional charge for the mail forwarding or extra volume. For $500 per year, you get a bit higher of a limit on the details, around 50 included scans, etc. but still also have to pay for the mail forwarding based on location. This service is much more cost efficient for local delivery, and ECM gives you a choice of addresses to register for your inbox. Digging deeper into Earth Class Mail, I found they are doing some advanced research into automating all of this with robotics and have already inked a deal with the Swiss National Post to offer the service at a governmental level. With the rise of Googlers to the Obama cabinet, and the tech innovators working there from other sources, this may be a very visible and doable “IT upgrade” of the US infrastructure that gets implemented officially at the Post Office level soon.

The main worry I would have with this system is its stability, as they say the Post service is the bedrock of reliability as far as governmental utilities go, and an alliance with Earth Class Mail on this level takes most of that worry away. Nevertheless, I have heard that they are closing offices and selling operations during the downturn, and obviously that is the critical issue along with security for a business looking to commit to this system. From what I can gather, it is more of an interest of the start-up investors to “sell out” to a large company like Fed Ex or UPS who can take the service to the next level of popularity, rather than a dissolution issue, that is driving the sale. The service is fairly reasonably priced for entry level users, but there is really no other comparable communication package that can so completely transform the snail mail inbox as Earth Class Mail.

Google Voice:

“Google Voice is a service that gives you one number for all your phones, voicemail that is easy as email, and many enhanced calling features like call blocking and screening, voicemail transcripts, call conferencing, international calls, and more.”

One number for all your calls and SMS

• Call screening – Announce and screen callers
• Listen in – Listen before taking a call
• Block calls – Keep unwanted callers at bay
• SMS – Send, receive, and store SMS
• Place calls – Call US numbers for free
• Taking calls – Answer on any of your phones
• Phone routing – Phones ring based on who calls
• Forwarding phones – Add phones and decide which ring

Voicemail as easy as email, with transcripts

• Voicemail transcripts – Read what your voicemail says
• Listen to voicemail – Check online or from your phone
• Notifications – Receive voicemails via email or SMS
• Personalize greeting – Vary greetings by caller
• Share voicemail – Forward or download voicemails

More cool things you can do with Google Voice

• Conference calling – Join people into a single call
• Call record – Record calls and store them online
• Call switch – Switch phones during a call
• Mobile site – View your inbox from your mobile
• GOOG-411 – Check directory assistance
• Manage groups – Set preferences by group

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFVXAqFNgic

Google Voice looks to be about as good of a digital service for telephone use as Earth Class Mail is for snail mail, bringing it all into a web interface for easy management and extension. Both are perfect illustrations of the arguments put out by Marshall McLuhan in chapter one of “Understanding Media”. Snail mail and telephone management are still hold-outs from most people’s digital toolbox. I see these both as “game changers,” like the smart grid, because of the innovative way they remix the old content into cloud applications functioning remotely on the web (“sky-net“).

Along with Google Voice, I am also considering the upgrade to Google Apps Premium: http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/index.html

At only $50 per year for a single user, it is reasonably priced but doesn’t seem to include too much more than the already available and free tools like gmail, gchat, video chat, calendar, documents, etc. etc. from Google. The problem is that the free version of gmail limits the addition of external POP accounts to 5. If you are managing multiple domains, with multiple email accounts per domain, it is unlikely that gmail is going to be sufficient to manage all of the email accounts unless you upgrade to Premium. I currently use a combination of Outlook, Thunderbird, and gmail for POP mail, so an upgrade + Google Voice would be a powerful integrated solution that should cover most of the business communication needs of our outsourcing business.

Google Voice should be released publicly within a couple of weeks.

Earth Class Mail – homepage: http://www.earthclassmail.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/earthclassmail