Yahoo! News - Stamps.com Falls on Concern Over Product Test
[Excerpts]
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Shares of Stamps.com (Nasdaq:STMP - news), which sells postage over the Internet, fell 11 percent on Thursday on concerns that its PhotoStamps service, which allows the creation of personalized stamps, might be discontinued, an analyst said.
Mike Crawford, an analyst at B. Riley & Co., who recommends buying the stock, said the stock fell on uncertainty surrounding the market test of PhotoStamps.
Crawford said the U.S. Postal Service is concerned about inappropriate images appearing on stamps after The Smoking Gun (http://www.thesmokinggun.com/) Web site submitted infamous images of celebrities to test what would appear on postage stamps.
Pictures of Lee Harvey Oswald and organized crime figure Sammy "the Bull" Gravano were rejected by the service, when The Smoking Gun submitted them.
Photos submitted by The Smoking Gun that made the cut included Unabomber Ted Kaczynski's high school and college yearbook photos; Slobodan Milosevic (news - web sites), the former Yugoslav President who is facing a war crimes tribunal; Monica Lewinsky's blue dress; and New Jersey Gov. James McGreevey with Golan Cipel.
This is another corollary to Gresham's Law: Bad folks drive out good ideas. It's a shame that Stamps.com couldn't do something simple like require customers to tell, under penalty of some obscure federal US law, to tell who the photos were of. I thought the idea of providing personalized stamps for a reasonable fee was a great use of digital technology.
Posted by: Preston Earle at September 24, 2004 07:16 PM