This is a guest post by researcher Tarun Wadhwa

A few blocks away from my apartment, a store remains that Yelp users describe as “dirty,” “disgusting,” “horrible,” and “saturated with bitterness.”  But this particular store is still in business, and probably will be for a long time to come.  What type of establishment could have their customers routinely express such deep rooted frustration, and still get away with it?  The local Post Office, of course.

At some point, we have all probably thought about doing something like what Michael Richards’ character Kramer tried to do on Seinfeld – get out of the system, permanently. In a famous exchange, when Postal Employee Newman asks him what he will do about his bills, cards, and letters, Kramer points out that he can use “e-mail, telephones, fax machines, FedEx, Telex, telegrams, and holograms.” And he’s right. For your everyday needs, there are now a wide variety of ways to communicate and conduct transactions. Few people actually want the bulk of the items that come through their mailbox these days.

But as despised and problematic as it is, the Postal Service is one of the most important institutions in this country. It is essential to a functioning economy, and is thankfully not going anywhere, anytime soon.

There have been plenty of loud declarations that Postal Service has failed and will be out of business shortly.  But these arguments usually reveal how little people understand about what the Postal Service actually does – and how little they appreciate this institution’s amazing reach and scale.  Handling over 160 billion pieces of mail in a year (40 percent of the world’s mail), the Postal Service provides universal coverage for accessing their services to the entire country for low, standardized prices.  They make regular deliveries to remote islands and secluded areas that would not be worth the trouble for a private business.

And in rural and low-income regions where broadband isn’t commonly available, they provide a much-needed lifeline for communication.

Most recently, Outbox, a start-up from Austin, Texas, has reignited the debate over the future of mail.  Since their launch in San Francisco earlier this month, they have attracted a lot of excitement with their simple plan to allow people to have their physical mail picked up, scanned, and digitized for a five dollars a month.  In reality, this may not be the only cost; they are reportedly exploring ways to bring the sketchy practices of targeted e-mail advertising to the physical world.  Furthermore, their marketing reveals a very immature understanding of why the Postal Service — which they strangely refer to as “America’s oldest social network” — cannot simply be “recreated” by a few guys driving around in a Prius.

A suggestion that often comes up is to just dismantle the Postal Service and have everyone switch to using private services like FedEx, UPS, and DHL.  The people making these arguments are probably unaware that these companies are deeply reliant on the Postal Service for many of their everyday functions – comparatively, they do not come close to the Postal Service’s domestic infrastructure.  One study estimated that in 2011, over 30 percent of FedEx Ground shipments were actually delivered by the Postal Service, and although they compete, these groups regularly partner with each other.

While it is true that the volume of mail has been declining for years now, the biggest issues currently facing the Postal Service have more to do with political incompetence than technological disruption.

Contrary to popular belief, the Postal Service does not rely on taxpayer funds to function.  However, because it is a government agency, Congress is able to demand that they provide universal coverage, and maximum service, regardless of cost – while at the same time refusing to allow them to make the tough business decisions that companies regularly face. Last year, ten postal workers went on a hunger strike to bring attention to a ridiculous requirement, instituted by Congress in 2006, that the Postal Service prefund its future retirees’ health benefits to the tune of over $5 billion a year (a requirement not present in any other government agency, and rarely seen in the private sector).  These expenses have brought on the continual state of crisis that the Postal Service has been in for the last few years.  Eighty percent of post offices lose money - but they are unable to shut these buildings down because few legislators want to answer to their constituents about why their local post office has closed.

Just as the decline of railroads forced the Postal Service to adapt in the 1970s, they are now again at a point where they must undergo major transformations – and luckily, there are plenty of ways to improve and modernize their services.

From Amazon to Birchbox, businesses rely on being able to get small goods to their customers at a cheap price.  In addition to the eight million people and 1.1 trillion dollars in direct mail, financial services, and related industries that are directly reliant on the Postal Service, the future of many small businesses and entrepreneurs hang in the balance as well.  There are over two million sellers on eBay, and there are also over twenty-one million self-employed workers, many of whom rely on selling goods on the internet and shipping them through the Postal Service for their livelihood.

Like many government programs, we are intimately familiar with the inefficiency and frustration of receiving services, but we don’t grasp the huge amount of work and logistics needed to provide them.  The Postal Service isn’t a dying industry, it’s far from it.  We should notsimply just wish it away without thinking of the deep and lasting consequences that its absence would create.  But that doesn’t mean I won’t fantasize about it next time I’m stuck in line at the Post Office.

Tarun Wadhwa is a research associate at Singularity University researching how advancing technologies can be used to solve public policy issues. 

Follow him on Twitter @twadhwa

Next time you pour out a little liquor for your homies, pour a little more out for Saturday mail delivery service. The USPS is officially making Saturday a day of rest for its mail carriers.

This move comes amid ongoing staff layoffs, location closures, loan defaults, billion-dollar losses, and budget cutbacks for the postal service. The most recent impasse comes with its plan, revealed today, to cut spending in the service by $2 billion per year.

P.O. boxes will still get Saturday service, and packages will still be delivered. Just regular mail — those lovely bills and Crate & Barrell catalogs — will get the Saturday axe.

The new schedule is slated to begin in August 2013, ample time, USPS says, for its customers to “plan and adjust.” USPS also said it and a group of news organizations polled customers and found that 70 percent were in favor of the plan.

“The American public understands the financial challenges of the Postal Service and supports these steps as a responsible and reasonable approach to improving our financial situation,” said Patrick R. Donahoe, Postmaster General.

“The Postal Service has a responsibility to take the steps necessary to return to long-term financial stability and ensure the continued affordability of the U.S. Mail.”

To be sure, the rise of electronic communications has played some role in the USPS’s painful changes; however, these new modes of communication have been in the works for more than 30 years. What’s more to blame for today’s crises is Congress itself.

As ThinkProgress has repeatedly noted, because Congress requires the service to fund retired employees’ healthcare pensions 75 years out, the USPS is trying to stockpile huge amounts of cash over a ten-year period. According to various analyses, the USPS would be operating at a surplus of $1.5 billion if this stockpile requirement — unique among all government agencies — were removed.

In conclusion, the USPS ain’t all bad; the service is trying to make the best of a bad political situation. And believe it or not, the USPS has its eyes on the future of mail, too; its amazing CES augmented reality demo is a case in point.

It all has to do with skeuomorphic design.

I’m guessing most of us didn’t have a clue what that was yesterday, but very likely many of us have encountered it and wondered about it in Apple products.

Skeuomorphic design is design that connects the new to the old with decorative but unnecessary elements. An example is Apple’s iCal app, which includes a faux-leather header with vestiges of ripped-off paper immediately below, as if we were all ripping paper pages off our computer monitors:

A similar example is Apple’s Notes app, with a little less leather but a little more rip:

One problem with skeuomorphic design is that it doesn’t fit Apple’s design aesthetic in so many other apps. For instance, Safari or Mail don’t have any leather or ripped off pages. For Safari, that could be understood, as there are no pre-technological antecedents: no-one had a web browser before the personal computer became ubiquitous. But mail had been invented … and yet Apple’s Mail app showed no design cues of parchment or inkwells and the like.

The overall experience led to a strange dichotomy of design, where sleek, functional apps such as Safari and QuickTime were matched side-by-side with frankly old-fashioned-looking apps. That was confusing from Apple, supposedly the high priest of design.

iPhoto, for instance, bears no resemblance to a old-fashioned photo album:

The other, more philosophical, and arguably bigger issue is that skeuomorphic design is inherently distasteful to many designers. It is decorative, not functional. It is excess, bigger in size and heavier in cognitive load than a user interface that is slimmed down to its bare essentials. And yes, if that sounds like a certain Apple design guru, Jony Ive hated it.

Of course, Scott Forstall didn’t oversee all design at Apple. However, he was in charge of iOS, and iOS is by far Apple’s most popular operating system, and the operating system of its cash cow (OS X is found in products accounting for under 20 percent of Apple’s revenue). Forstall was a fan of skeuomorphic design — as, it must be admitted, was Steve Jobs to a degree — and the results can be found in Apple apps.

iBooks, Find My Friends, and Newstand are only a few of the examples. Wood and leather show up in copious quantities on the high-res glass screen of one of the most modern digital artifacts ever created:

Again, the effect is inconsistent with other Apple apps such as Mail and is oddly jarring as the user is taken from a super-modern, clean, simple user interface into one with a lot of extra weight, detail, and effect.

To a designer like Jony Ive, who has spent his life and career removing excess, trimming away unneeded detail, and simplifying, there is something inherently dishonest about skeuomorphic design. It’s something of a lie … there is no wood in your iPhone, no dead animal skin, and there’s no paper on your laptop screen to be torn off.

As such, we can expect big visual changes in the next versions of Apple apps in iOS and OS X. And, if all goes well, we can thank Scott Forstall’s departure for the simplification or, perhaps, consolidation of Apple’s design language.

Image credits: Top, Wikipedia, all others, John Koetsier

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Update: iOS 5 is now available for download.
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Apple announced today its latest mobile operating system update, iOS 5, will be available for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch owners to download on October 12.

Today’s Apple event had little by way of new features available in iOS 5, but did recap what we can expect next Wednesday when we all plug into iTunes.

According to Scott Forstall, Apple’s senior vice president of iOS Software, who took the stage to talk iOS, the new release has over 200 new features to offer. Here are the top ten features he highlighted:

Better Notifications: iOS 5 will include the new Notification Center, which can be accessed by swiping your finger downward on any iPhone screen. You can customize which notifications appear, including emails, texts, Game Center updates and weather. The point is to make notifications less like that interrupting cow in your knock knock joke.

iMessage: The new messaging feature allows iOS users to communicate over 3G and Wi-Fi with any iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad running iOS 5. You will be able to send photos and video, receive message delivery and read receipts, and see when others are typing. iMessages are synced to all of your devices, so you can pick up a conversation where you left off. Apple also promises your messages will be encrypted end-to-end for security.

Reminders: For the forgetful among us, reminders combines to-do lists and reminders. The feature can alert people to the simple things such as, “Pick up your dry cleaning,” or, “Your mother-in-law has been at the airport for an hour, prepare to sleep on the couch.” You can also set up a geofence around an area, that will set off a reminder once you leave that space. Reminders sync with Outlook, Apple’s iCal and iCloud so that they’re available across all of your devices.

Twitter Integration: Forstall said, ““We have integrated Twitter deeply into the OS. We have integrated Twitter into many of the built-in apps.” You only have to log in to Twitter once in your iOS device’s Settings screen. Then you can use it across the built-in iOS 5 apps and share websites from the Safari, YouTube, Photos app and more.

Newsstand: All of your favorite news publications, such as the New York Times, the New Yorker and Allure, are aggregated into a special folder on your home screen iOS device called newsstand. Apps purchased in the Newsstand section of the App Store automatically download to this folder. While you’re going about your business, Newsstand continues to download new content from your subscriptions.

Camera: When you need to whip out your camera and grab that fleeting shot of a seagull flying in front of the setting sun, you don’t want to wait to unlock your phone and access the camera. Apple’s answer to that is a shortcut in iOS 5 that doesn’t require you to enter a lock code to take a picture — just double click on the home screen and hit the Camera button. iOS 5 will also have new camera features, including auto focus and exposure lock, a rule-of-thirds grid overlay, pinch-to-zoom and the ability to use the volume up button as a shutter release button. On the other side, there are finally editing options to clean up pictures after you take them, including red eye removal, cropping and auto levels.

Game Center: We’re all about content discovery lately, and gaming is the next frontier. iOS 5 is rolling out game and friend discovery to its over 67 million Game Center users. A sequel to Infinity Blade by Epic Games is also coming out, made specifically for the new iPhone 4S.

New Safari: Forstall says, “”This next feature is one of my favorite: Tab browsing.” Tabbed browsing is just as it sounds, a way to switch between pages you’re reading simultaneously, like you do on a desktop. If you don’t have time to read a page, you can now “save” that page for later with the Safari Reader tool. Saved articles will be synced across all of your devices with iCloud, so you can pick up an article on your iPad where you left off on your iPhone.

Mail: The iOS Mail app will be more like a traditional email inbox! iOS 5 allows you to flag messages, search your whole inbox and write emails with rich text formatting, including bold and underlined fonts.

PC Free: Cast off the chains tying your mobile to your computer! With iOS 5, iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users will no longer have to physically connect to a computer in order to activate their new devices or download important iOS updates. And with iCloud, you can backup photos, email, and other data wirelessly as well.

Look out for the iOS update next week.

[Some photos by Christina Bonnington and Brian X. Chen/Wired.com]

Rather than getting all their office apps from one vendor, he said, the best strategy in the enterprise space — and now the consumer space — is to find a service that wraps together the best apps from multiple companies that all do one thing very well.

Box.net (which specializes in enterprise cloud storage) is moving in that direction by adding the ability to access and use files from other companies like customer relationship management software provider Salesforce.com and Google Docs, an online document editor. That’s also a strategy that companies like Microsoft and Apple seem to be avoiding, Levie said.

“With iCloud, Apple’s … seeing the cloud as a way to connect their devices together and their software,” Levie said. “We think it’s moving in the direction of openness, by combining the tools together and making it work seamlessly.”

iCloud is Apple’s next iteration of MobileMe, which will include access to online mail, contacts, and calendar applications. When a user makes a new contact or calendar entry on his or her iOS device, the entry is automatically put in the cloud and then pushed to all other iOS devices. If you ever change that information, it is automatically updated on all devices. Apple chief executive Steve Jobs also talked about three other new iCloud apps — Documents, Photo Stream, and iTunes in the Cloud — when he unveiled the service in June.

Levie said that Microsoft was attempting to do the same thing with Office 365, the company’s online version of its flagship Office software. It’s a cloud-based version of Office and gives customers access to document editing, email, customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software under a single blanket.

Box.net’s strategy is to do one thing — cloud storage — and be very good at it. And if Levie’s prediction of where the market’s heading plays out, the company could see a big payoff. The startup seems to have investors convinced that it’s on the right road — it just managed to raise a $48 million round of funding that it will use to double its engineering and sales staffs. On the other hand, it’s difficult to discount Microsoft and Apple’s strategies — with market caps of $209 billion and $300 billion respectively, they certainly have a lot of weight behind them.

But Box.net does currently has 6 million users. Some 60,000 businesses employ its cloud-storage software, including 73 percent of Fortune 500 companies. That figure is up from around 66 percent in February. The company is also no stranger to mobile — as of January, its iPhone application recorded more than 250,000 downloads and its Android application had been downloaded more than 70,000 times.

“We can only build so much and of our limited time we want to be the best place to store and manage your data,” Levie said. “The competition thinks very differently.”

The most notable change users will notice is speed, as the service claims to be twice as fast as the old version. There’s also the new ability to send attachments up to 100 megabytes, a more powerful spam filter, and new social networking features, with Facebook and Twitter updates appearing inside Yahoo’s mailboxes.

I had the chance to try out the beta version of this massive facelift over the past few months, and it’s a considerable upgrade in terms of speed, organization, and efficiency. When the company says it works much faster, it’s dead on. I also appreciated being able to personalize the e-mail more with new colors. The only thing I don’t like about the update is a permanent vertical ad that always sits next to your inbox. Comparably, my Gmail account has no such ads.

There’s no doubt the revamp is aimed at stopping Yahoo users from fleeing to other services. Yahoo’s mail service has been slowly shedding customers to Gmail, which has 220 million users and keeps growing steadily. Yahoo lost 3 million users from April 2010 to April 2011, while Gmail gained 24 million users during the same period.

As VentureBeat’s Anthony Ha (who loves the service probably more than is healthy) writes: “The feature divides your inbox into three areas, all viewable in one screen — at the top, there’s the “priority” emails, the ones you should read first; below that are the emails you have starred (an existing Gmail feature to mark emails as important); and the inbox with everything else.”

To activate the feature, click the “New! Priority Inbox” link in the top-right corner of your Gmail screen.

I finally gained access to Priority Inbox on my personal Gmail account last night and instantly fell in love with it as well. At first, it managed to do a decent job of sorting my important emails. After a bit more training this morning, it’s now correctly landing pretty much all of my important messages. It’s also nice to have access to starred messages right inside the inbox, instead of waiting for another page to load.

It’s certainly going to take some getting used to for some, but for me, it seems to be a logical extension of the way I’ve always used Gmail. Like many, I started out with an elaborate system of filters and labels. But over time, I got lazy about filtering, and just relied on picking out the important messages in my inbox by eye. I never tidy up my inbox, so less important messages stay unread and never get archived.

Now with Priority Inbox, the important stuff floats to the top, and I can just ignore the other mail as always. With Gmail’s increasing storage sizes, I’m not too concerned about deleting unwanted messages. And after becoming an iPhone user, I’ve learned it’s much more useful for iPhone searching to keep mail in my inbox, rather than archiving it.

Now that the iPhone finally has threaded mail conversations built-in, Priority Inbox will be yet another feature that iPhone users won’t have access to in their mail client. Meanwhile, Google can easily update its Android Gmail app to take advantage of it. (Gmail’s web client doesn’t support it yet, but even when it does, it won’t be as useful as a mail client with the feature.) I wouldn’t be surprised if some users make the Android jump for this feature alone.