Zumbox might be the next step towards the final demise of the USPS. It claims to replace every existing, physical street address in the United States with an equivalent web page that allows the person at that address to log in and view mail sent to them through Zumbox.

Here’s how it works: people who wish to send mail via zumbox rather than regular mail can send a virtual (scanned or file-based version) through zumbox to the street or mailing address of the person it’s to go to.

The receiver logs in and retrieves the virtual mail from the zumbox website. Once retrieved, the mail can be printed, saved, or discarded at the receiver’s discretion. Mail sent this way meets several security requirements, including medical HIPPA and financial banking restrictions.

The cost for most users is free and all mail is free to receive. Larger senders, like businesses or clubs, pay fees of about two cents per mailing for bulk mailings. So a business that currently spends forty-one cents per letter to send monthly invoices, for example, could send those same invoices for two cents each instead. There is an API for developers to integrate their mailings automatically with zumbox.

The real question here is compliance and usability. In order to initially read mail, users first must create an account with Zumbox and wait for a PIN to arrive via regular snail mail (maybe the USPS will still have a use). While they claim it works with any postal address in the U.S., however, my address (which is a PO box) did not work and produced an error. With their permission, I tried it with my neighbor’s physical address (which receives mail deliveries, mine does not) and it did work there.

The site is in beta, so some problems can be expected. Zumbox is based in Westlake Village, California and has a comprehensive FAQ and help center on their website as well as contact emails for several company officers and specialists.

While it may not be a total replacement for the USPS, Zumbox could be the next step towards that paperless dream. I can imagine the possibilities of spam filters in the future killing off the junk mail in my virtual “physical” mailbox too. Of course, that would remove one of my favorite past-times: stuffing junk mail back into the return address envelope and mailing it back, postage due. Perhaps technology does sometimes come at too high a price.

It seems that if you want to send a truly funny greeting card these days, you need to write it yourself. Or you can let Someecards.com do the sarcastic posturing.

Someecards has inappropriate greetings for every occasion, but the workplace-focused cards are easily the best. The simple, sarcastic copy is complemented by minimalist , plucky illustrations. What about a card depicting some 1800s traders on a canoe in the wilderness claiming, “They can’t lay us off if they can’t find us.” Or another card with a curmudgeon tossing back an overflowing pint stating, “I’m burned out from putting in 38-hour work weeks.” Good, good stuff.

Ad Age named someecards the second best way to waste time on the Web. They’ve also been written up by The New York Times, US Weekly and Gawker. And someecards fires out more than 500,000 greetings a month to inboxes around the world.

As you can see, they’re just a smidgeon hipper than Hallmark. But then again, so is Rachel Ray. And heck, if you don’t find any greetings you like, you can even create your own blue greeting and have fellow cynics vote on them.

Here is mine: “I started my own business just so I could can myself.”

For most in creative or knowledge-based IT fields, this kind of tracking and report filing can be the most mundane part of the job. FreeTime is hoping to minimize the time and effort required for this, cutting out the need to rewrite or re-file project updates and information.

The site is straight-forward and easy to use, with a free 30-day trial to get you started. The widget can be used on their site (with a login) or as a plug-in to your own site. Time tracking, budgets, deadlines, and more can be tracked using FreeTime and reports, graphs, and so forth can be pulled or created in real time.

Secure logins and other features are there, of course, as are team management tools and client communications tools. The widget works with most major browsers and desktops.

FreeTime was created by a team of designers for in-house use and has been in development and use for about a year. The group (Zoo2) opened FreeTime for public use just recently. The widget works on the desktop while the browser applications (and browser-based widget, if you prefer to use it) work in-browser.

Most everything from the dashboard reports and graphs can be downloaded and integrated into reporting tools like MS Office, OpenOffice, etc. Subscriptions start at $9.95/month for personal use and go up to 25 users at $99.95/month. The subscription can be customized for individual business needs.

This could be a useful tool for the small design/development house, for freelancers who need a time-management tool they can link clients to, and for managers who are tired of complaints about their overbearing time tracking requirements.

It’s worth trying for at least the free 30 days to find out if it’ll work for you.

If that’s the case, you’re probably not happy with the paltry offerings most providers give in the way of “news” updates and feeds. Fox News Sports, CNN headlines, questionable stock posts? Gimme a break. Being able to integrate my real news (meaning the RSS feeds I read) on my phone is what I’d consider a Holy Grail of sorts.

That is the gap Kwyno wants to bridge: the gap between RSS and SMS, that is. So far, the beta client, developed by Raphael Caixeta of Boca Raton, Florida, is working well with IM and promises to have SMS up and running soon.

While it’s extremely new and very unfinished, Kwyno has a lot of promise. Working like a “command line” (for now), the site allows you to log in and then presents you with a simple text entry box and awaits your command. Entering “check twitter” will bring up a list of your latest Twitter feed headlines.

You can integrate your most useful sites, like Twitter or YouTube subscriptions, when you set up your account. You can also give a default ZIP code or city/state and use it to check weather. That’s just the start and Raphael assures us he’s hard at work adding more functionality to the site. When he gets the SMS up, many of us will be in heaven.

For now, this is a side project of Caixeta’s and is privately funded. The beta site requires an invite code to sign up and is accepting kudos and criticisms (along with fresh ideas) from users to improve the site. Developers from social or feed sites are encouraged to contact Kwyno about integrating their site with Kwyno and an API for installing Kwyno into other applications is under development.

Presently, the site is not only in closed beta, but limited in usefulness. It shows a lot of promise, though, and will likely grow through user interaction and suggestion. Expect to see a lot more from this site in the near future as buzz picks up about it. Especially when it goes public for general use.

Definitely a must-watch for the mobile junkie.

Cash is always good, but not always easy to give. Especially if your gift is to be mailed. That’s where gift cards come in handy. Not only are they transferable, like cash (and unlike checks), but they can be used anywhere, including online. Personalized gift cards are even better.

At GiftCards.com, you can build a gift card with almost any denomination of money you’d like and you can personalize it with a photo or graphic to make it truly special.

Gift cards are a popular gift item and can save the day when you can’t find the perfect gift or aren’t sure what it would be. They’re more personal than cash and more versatile to boot, so they’ve become a popular way to give. GiftCards.com offers cards that aren’t limited to one store (like a Wal-Mart or Border’s Books card would be) and can be used online or off.

Cards at GiftCards.com are pretty simple to make, with the site using a WYSIWYG tool to place photos and build your card. It takes about three minutes to build a card and it can be preloaded with up to $500. Delivery to you or directly to the person you’re gifting it to is also available, with overnight shipping available for the last-minute shopper.

Not only are gift cards more personal than cash, but they can be made even more personal by adding your own photo. Without breaking any federal forgery laws.

With clockspot, a new online employee tracking service, phoning it in is no longer the cry of the slacker employee. That’s because the Web widget approach to employee time management enables remote workers to clock in and out via phone or Internet.

Ideal for companies with many locations, oodles of offsite employees and even contract workers, clockspot is a versatile and cost-effective solution that’s eons beyond the antiquated physical clock approach. And HR will be happy that no one will be punching anything, metaphorically speaking or otherwise. In addition to tracking employee time, the service also allows employers to build billing and time reports to identify and track trends. Are there specific times of the year when employees call in “sick” that aren’t as obvious as New Year’s Eve? Clockspot will help expose them.

Employees benefit from the Web-driven solution too, as they can easily catch a glimpse of how many vacation days they have left to burn at the end of each year, in addition to checking out other vital stats from their online timesheets.

Clockspot offers a robust demo and free tour, and pricing starts at just $10 a month. The D.I.Y approach is ideal for small and medium businesses. And unlike some of the greedy employee time-tracking industry giants out there, there are no set-up and cancellation fees or long-term contracts with clockspot. That means you can punch out whenever you want. And you’ll even save a couple of trees by losing those pesky timecards.

Alright, maybe not. Still, the plan behind this site is pretty grass roots, to say the least.

First, you have to buy into the fact that global warming is a human-caused phenomenon. That basic premise is at the heart of the site. I won’t go into whether it is or isn’t fact or fiction, but it is pretty key to this site’s whole concept. Next, you need to want to make change in how humans cause that global warming. Then you have to sign up for the site and get a number.

I keep coming back to the number because the t-shirt the site features prominently gives you a number based on when you sign up. So if you’re user 8,796 to sign up, you get a shirt with that number printed on it. I literally had a hard time getting past that to get into the rest of the site’s concept, which is to socially network, like-minded climate change activists.

“Be unique like everyone else” is the phrase I keep coming up with here. “Together, we make change as individuals.” Don’t be surprised if that comes up trademarked somewhere too. I’ve tried really hard not to make social commentary the cornerstone of this article, but I just can’t help myself.

Alright, back to the site. WeAddUp.com has most of the social aspects you’d expect from a site like this: a blog/news feed, access through Twitter and other popular networking sites, affiliate and fundraising information, and products (green, of course) to sell. Honestly, other than the nice design layout and clean site feed and build, there isn’t anything truly new or original here. Nothing you won’t find on most half-activist, half-estore sites, anyways.

So if climate change is your thing and you want to get involved and get a t-shirt with a number on it, WeAddUp.com is the place for you.

News isn’t just fed in an endless stream of linkable headlines, though. It’s sorted, grouped, and organized to make it useful and timely, depending on your preferences for news. Maybe you’re into Hacker News more than, say Google News? Well, you can prioritize stuff from one site over the other. Or remove a site from your dashboard altogether. Then you can feed these to yourself via RSS or most any other favorite way (even Twitter).

For true info junkies and tech gobblers, Techfuga really comes through. Want to know the latest emulators for your favorite old-school games? How about the news that dropped last hour on Windows 7? Maybe your cell phone needs tweaking and you’d like to know what your carrier doesn’t want you to know about SMS’ true capabilities.

It’s all there on Techfuga. This is a truly great find for the real, hard-core tech news junkie. For everyone else, it’s probably all jargon anyway. This ain’t CNN.

Based in the UK, the site was started by Chris Osborne and Jeremy Baines in 2007, along with angel investor Toby Smallpeice. Since then, it’s gained in market share and built an impressive user base in both the UK and the United States.

The idea is simple: as you browse the Web looking for products or researching a purchase, you’re going to have a lot of information you’d like to keep track of. Or perhaps you’ve run into things you might want to get, but don’t have the money for or the time to spend purchasing right now. So you bookmark it using Boxedup rather than your browser’s bookmarks (which are usually quickly forgotten). The item is put onto a virtual Wish List that you can later go back to and categorize, delete, or purchase from.

In addition to this, items listed in your Boxedup bookmarks will show other purchase options from other online stores, possibly saving you some money. If you’re inclined to write online reviews or at least vote on products you’ve purchased, you can do so as well, so others who might see that product will know what you thought of it.

The most obvious draw point for this site, however, is its use as a sort of “gift registry” from which items you’re interested in getting can be searched by your friends, family, and other ‘Net friends to purchase as a gift. With integration into social sites like Facebook, Boxedup allows you to share your wanted items list. By default, items that are purchased as a gift are no longer shown as possible gifts to other potential gift-givers.

The site monetizes itself through both Google AdSense integration and from affiliate sales based on recommended products through the site.

Boxedup is currently boasting 13,000 registered users and around 30,000 unique visitors per month. With an upcoming advertising blitz and some publicity, they hope to grow that number to over 100k. The site is free to use and might be a great find for the online shopper.

Sigmyfeed enables its users to get a friendly HTML signature image that displays their feed’s latest post. This allows for people to have a friendly way of cross advertising their blog on forums, websites and anywhere else which will accept the HTML code.  All you have to do is visit www.sigmyfeed.com and type in the URL of your blogs feed and this simple creative tool generates a code for you in seconds. There are also several different design and color options to choose from. It’s free, and it helps me promote my blog…I like it! Nice work Raphyy!!  Below is an example of what the banner looks like.  I had to use worstpizza as the guinea pig, since for some reason I couldn’t get sCommerce to work properly.