Electronic Pictured Postcards of Czech Postal Administration

By Lubor Kunc (lubor.kunc@seznam.cz)

Published in the Czechoslovak Specialist (www.csphilately.org)

Czech Postal Administration started in 2006 a new service for public: sending of electronic pictured postcards to friends, family members or other persons. The system is a combination of electronic postcards being offered by various Internet companies and classical pictured postcards delivered by post offices.

The postcard sender makes a picture by cellphone (e.g. Motorola SLVR or Nokia3650 phones) or downloads it from Internet. This picture to be send by e-mail or via a MMS message (multimedia messages sent from cellphones) together with card text and address to Czech Postal Administration. The post administration prints the picture and text to a special card and delivers it by standard way to addressee.

The service costs CZK 30,- (about 1,50 USD) and is paid by sending a SMS message to specific number, so you pay this card within your cellphone bill without respect to the fact, who is your cellphone service provider. This is very easy and effective way being used very often in the Czech Republic – you can use it e.g. for payment of Coca Cola cans, insurance premiums or other services. The penetration of Czech population with cellphones is more than 100%, that means the in the Czech Republic “lives” more cellphones than people! This situation is caused by using different cellphones for private and business calls. It is not allowed to send the cards abroad.

However the costs for this service seems too high (in comparison to CZK 10,- = costs of sending normal domestic pictured postcard), the price is comparable with standard postage valid in other European countries, where the costs for sending a normal pictured postcard are about 1 EUR. This is one of advantages of the service, you get fast service for price of normal one. If you make a picture during your foreign holiday, you send it from your cellphone to Czech Postal Administration, which produces and delivers the pictured postcard to your friend. The whole process takes about 2-3 days, this is a shorter period than mailing the postcard at normal post office in country you are traveling in, because regular mail within Europe goes 5 – 7 days and Oversea mail about 10 – 14 days.

Fig. 1 – early usage of electronic postcard sent via Czech Postal Administration

As you see from above illustration, the electronic pictured postcard bears special “postage stamps”, which has been never issued in standard form (fig. 2). It will be interesting, if the postcards to be registered in philatelic catalogues or not. Detailed registration of every produced card is not possible, because picture of every postcard will be personalized to sender, but the catalogues might probably register the postcard as specific type of postal stationery based on pre-printed stamp.

Fig. 2

Czech Postal Administration also offers pre-printed cards with pictures shown on the Internet (fig. 3), which can be used, if the sender has no own image for publishing. You can chose congratulation cards, Christmas one, greetings from some Czech towns etc. .

Fig. 3

Generally, Czech Postal Administration supports this service by special web site (www.doschranky.cz) being useful for downloading the card images, sending pictures to the postal administration etc. .

The system seems to be second stage of hybrid post launched by Czech Post in 2000 (fig. 4) being used by corporate clients for mailing large quantities of mail to consumers. This service is used by utility providers or insurance companies for mailing invoices or documents. The sending of the mail is very easy, the client just delivers CD containing the data to postal administration, which transmit them electronically to special centers, where the documents are printed, put into envelope and delivered by normal way to addressees. The electronic processing of the mail makes is cheaper than production by the individual customers.

Fig. 4 – envelope used for hybrid mail delivery bearing advertisement of POSTSERVIS

(division of Czech Postal Administration providing the hybrid mail service)

When we compare both of the services, we conclude that the electronic pictured postcard service is just application of hybrid post tailor made for public consumers being not interested in sending large quantities of mail, but wishing to send “something special” to their friends.

We will see, what is next development of this interesting service, but positive fact is that Czech Postal Administration started early electronic services which can substitute loss of income caused by huge usage of Internet devices.

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