Flicpost Mails Real Archival-Quality Photos, From Your iPhone, For Pennies, to Almost Anywhere [CES 2013]

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CES 2013 bug LAS VEGAS, CES 2013 – Once, a few years ago, I begged my dad to let me set him up with an email address. “Don’t do it now, I’m moving,” he said with a baffled look on his face. For my dad, whose familiarity with technology went little further than his solar-powered calculator, Flicpost would have been awesome.

The Flicpost service is a two-parter. The first half is a free iPhone app (both an Android and iPad app should be arriving early this year) that lets you upload photos from your iDevice or Twitter, Facebook or Flickr accounts. Then the service prints 5×7 photos from your digital images and sends them pretty much anywhere in the world — at almost literally unbelievable rates. For example, a half-dozen 5×7 prints from the U.S. to India is $1.69; that’s far less than, say, printing the same amount of 5x7s at your local Walmart, let alone paying for postage. The only limitation is that 12 prints are the maximum you can send in one package.

Co-founders Phil Coleman and Stephen Bero say they’ve managed to work this magic by finding unique ways to completely automate the entire process; and Phil says his 16 years in the postal industry has allowed him to find the tricks to cheap postage.

Ah, but you’re wondering about the quality of the prints. They were actually pretty good; the paper seemed a little thin, but Phil says the paper is from a major manufacturer; they felt like real photos, and they looked sharp and vibrant. More importantly, they’re archival quality, which means they won’t fade over the years.

You can check out pricing here, at their website; the iPhone route can also be bypassed by uploading images directly to the Flicpost website.

 

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