> <i>The request is sent to the scribe who lives closest to the recipient to ensure that their card arrives within a couple of days. Gemnote currently has about 20 to 25 scribes throughout the country, who are paid per card completed. Many are stay-at-home mothers, teachers on break, or students who have excellent penmanship and want to pick up extra income.</i><p>Wasn't this Joaquin Phoenix's profession in <i>Her</i>?<p>Except that in <i>Her</i>, the handwritten-greeting-card-as-a-service was portrayed satirically as the disconnect between real compassion and artificial compassion.
So do none of these gifts include actual food or alcohol?<p>This all looks very nice and I would use this for clients if the cheese tray included cheese and the drinking set included alcohol.
<i>“Our cards are opened at an almost 100 percent rate, but email is probably two percent or marked as spam. So there is a huge value proposition there, because sending out 500 cards might be more effective then sending out 2,000 emails,” says Wong.</i><p>Except that email is free...
This is really smart. The number of companies that are sending out cards and gifts is huge, and it makes no sense for each of them to do it on their own. I love that this is consolidated in a service that still lets them keep the personal touch.
I wonder if they have plans to automate the process (e.g. like Shyp). I'm assuming the way it works right now is that employees send out gifts on a case by case basis. What use cases are there for automation?
>> Gemnote, which just launched from Y Combinator, gives companies an alternative with items carefully selected to make sure they don’t end up in a junk drawer or snuck into Secret Santa gift exchanges.<p>Wow, what a fantastic idea. The key to Gemnote's success is that their items are "carefully selected". Surely nobody ever thought of "carefully selecting" their wares, before Gemnote.<p>Anyways, bottom line, the publicity piece for Gemnote was weak. Maybe they should re-evaluate their marketing.
Gemnote looks a lot like MailLift (<a href="http://MailLift.com" rel="nofollow">http://MailLift.com</a>) out of 500Startups. Excited to see what happens next in the space :)