View E cards E Cards E Cards Free E Cards Teddy Bear Valentine Cute Bears Forever Friends
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- Published: 2009-02-13
- Uploaded: 2010-11-25
- Author: rongxau
An e-card is similar to a postcard or greeting card, with the primary difference being that it is created using digital media instead of paper or other traditional materials. E-cards are made available by publishers usually on various Internet sites, where they can be sent to a recipient, usually via e-mail. It also considered more environmentally friendly compared to traditional paper cards. E-card businesses are considered environmentally friendly because their carbon footprint is generally much lower compared to paper card companies and because paper is not used in the end product.
E-cards are digital "content", which makes them much more versatile than traditional greeting cards. For example unlike traditional greetings, e-cards can be easily sent to many people at once or extensively personalized by the sender. Conceivably they could be saved to any computer or electronic device or even viewed on a television set, however e-card digital content has not yet progressed as far as digital video or digital audio in terms of varied usage.
Flash animated greeting cards can include interactivity, for example, asking the viewer to choose a picture to animate; however, most Flash e-cards are designed to convey the sentiment of the sender through simple observation.
Flash animated cards are offered today by almost all major e-card publishers and are consequently the most common format used.
One of the first companies that created MCards is a Dutch Company called Mgreetings (established in 2003). MCards can be sent from a PC in a similar way as sending ecards. Users can go to a website online, select a card enter the recipient's mobile number, and that card will be sent to the recipient's mobile phone as an MMS.
In 1995, E-Cards.com began hosting online greetings featuring nature and wildlife photos - the site was one of the first "E" named sites, so named to evoke both the electronic and environmental nature of its cards. By Valentine's Day 1996 online greetings were popular enough to be documented. That year, Valentine's cards were offered by Infobahn.com and Sony Entertainment, among others.
In October 1999, Excite@Home bought the web site Blue Mountain Arts for $780M (which represent a price of $71 per unique monthly user). The transaction has been referenced by CNN and Business 2.0 as evidence of the Dot-com bubble. On September 13, 2001, three weeks before filing for bankruptcy on October 1, 2001, Excite@Home sold BlueMountain.com to American Greetings for $35M, or $3.23 per unique monthly user. The web site BlueMountain.com remains a large web site, primarily focused on e-cards. In June 2008, JustAnotherDotCom.com purchased the free e-card site Greeting-cards.com and added it to their own greeting card site, which made them one of the largest e-card sites in the world .
Originally, most e-cards were free, by virtue of being sponsored by advertising. While free greeting cards are still the most prevalent and popular, some sites charge for either all e-cards or special premium e-cards. Others charge an annual membership which enables members to send cards for the duration of the membership.
Several non-profit organizations offer free ecards as a way of having a supporter introduce the organization to another individual. In 2006, SOS Children's Villages - USA began offering free ecards for many occasions such as birthdays, thank yous, and Mother's Day.
Sending an e-card to a given recipient invariably involves giving that recipient's email address to the e-card service – a third party. As with other third-party email services (such as mailing-list companies), the operator has the chance to misuse this address. One example of misuse is if the e-card service sends advertisements to the recipient's address. Under anti-spam rules used by major ISPs, such advertisements would be spam, since the recipient never asked ("opted in") to receive them. The e-card sender as well as the service could be held responsible for the act of spamming, since while the service sent the spam, the e-card sender provided the address.
In some cases, it may be illegal for an organization or business to use an e-card service to send greetings to its customers. For instance, data privacy laws may forbid a business from disclosing information about customers to a third party – including names and email addresses.
In late June 2007 a spate of emails with the subject line "You've received a postcard from a family member!" and other similar subjects, was seen making their way across the internet. Unfortunately most of these emails contained links to malicious web sites where Javascript was used to exploit the browser in order to compromise a system, or contained a link to a malware file masquerading as an e-card.
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
![Suters: Christmas 2009 [Corporate Video e-Card]](http://web.archive.org./web/20101219004754im_/http://i.ytimg.com/vi/GD0yBqCtbtY/2.jpg "Suters: Christmas 2009 [Corporate Video e-Card]")
