Remote Control Mail is a new service than blurs the line between email and snail mail by receiving all your postal items, scanning the front of them and placing the results into a web interface for you.

For a once-off activation fee of USD 25 and a sliding scale of monthly fees , the company’s service lets you see images of the postal mail you have received and then,

with a few mouse clicks you can have your mail forwarded, opened and scanned into a searchable PDF document you can read online (or print or save), recycled or shredded, or stored securely.

Interesting idea. Particularly useful, one imagines, for travelling salespeople, rockstars and others who are always on the move or have no fixed abode.

This service is only available to people with a postal address in the USA.

[Via TechCrunch ]not apple mail, email, internet, postal mail, culture change, snail mail

Tags: culture change, email, Internet, not apple mail, postal mail, Snail Mail

Yesterday Apple Australia kindly flew me up to Sydney for a look around its corporate headquarters and for a very interesting two-hour press presentation from Mr iPod and Mr Hardware. (Mr Software is at WWDC, so I didn’t hear from him.)

In the course of the day, I discovered four new things about Apple that I didn’t know before.

1. The black MacBook is intended to be a 12″ PowerBook replacement

I had the chance to ask Mr Hardware as he was presenting the now complete range of Intel Macs whether anything was coming to replace the 12″ PowerBook.

He told me that Apple has received a lot of feedback from users about the need for a small notebook with a “more professional look”. Apple made a conscious decision to meet that demand with the black MacBook, giving those users the look they wanted at the cost of a slight hit in performance and features. Is that why they cost more?

2. Only 26% of Mac users do backups, 4% use automated solutions.

Of course, you know at one level that the numbers are low, but it is still a shock to see just how low they are.

Those who have watched the keynote will know that Leopard’s Time Machine is designed to increase these numbers dramatically.

Will it work? I don’t think so. The current ability to automate backups with Backup 3.0 and the plethora of third-party automated backup options haven’t brought large numbers of users to the party. This won’t either. It’s not the technical ability that’s missing; it’s the personal habit.

Dear reader, for the love of God get yourself into that 4%. Don’t read the other two things I didn’t know about Apple. Go now and check out Dejà Vu or BackityMac or SuperDuper! or, if you have a .Mac account, Apple’s own Backup.

3. iTunes prints really nice CD covers.

I use iTunes a lot, but it never occurred to me to visit its Print menu. Mr iPod demonstrated how easy it is to make jewel case covers in iTunes and how nice the final result looks:

4. Steve Jobs doesn’t trust people who use words as a tool of their trade

At the airport I picked up a copy of Jeffrey Young and William Simon’s iCon: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2005) (Amazon ) to read on the plane.

On the homeward flight I discovered an answer to the mystery about the lack of communication between engineers and development teams at Apple and journalists, bloggers and third-party developers (after all, code is words).

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple and became Interim CEO in 1997, he

…quickly saw things that he didn’t like. His predecessors in the CEO’s office has never figured out how to take the reins in a commanding manner…. He set about changing the culture of Apple. Some of the changes were small (no dogs at work, no smoking), and some where whoppers, such as the absolute ban on talking to anyone outside the company who uses words as a tool of his trade. (The one exception: it was okay as long as you has a public relations dog-watcher sitting at your side and yanking your leash whenever she wanted you to stop talking.)

apple, steve jobs, itunes, not apple mail, macbook, words, culture change, backup, thanks Fiona, iPod

Tags: Apple, backup, culture change, iPod, iTunes, macbook, not apple mail, steve jobs, thanks Fiona, words