Network-based content collection and distribution system

Abstract

The invention collection of mail content in digital form and delivers of the mail content in hardcopy form over a distribution system that pushes the processing of the physical mail to a location close to the recipient's geographical address. A sender composes a mail item in digital form and the invention then distributes the digital content through a three tier model. The first tier accepts the digital content from the sender, verifies the identity of the sender, and prepares the digital content for presentation to the next tier. The second tier is a management point on the transmission network that determines the closest available processing location based on the geographical address of the recipient. The third tier consists of two or more processing locations that accept the digital content from the earlier tier, processes the digital content into hardcopy form, and presents the hardcopy content to a physical delivery system such as a postal service or commercial courier. Unlike the prior art of mapping a network addresses to a network addresses or mapping geographical addresses to geographical addresses, the invention maps the recipient's geographical address to a network address of a processing location. Thus, the physical delivery begins not from the digital content origin, which may be distant from the final destination, but from the available processing location that is closest to the recipient's geographical address.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.