An innovative and social way to get the goods delivered

Two problems: one solution. First, you can never remember your friends' addresses; second, even if you did you can't rely on Royal Mail to deliver. Enter stage left a group of young British entrepreneurs. They have devised a way of sending parcels that only requires you to know the email address or social media user name of your intended target.

By working with a home delivery courier company that they say will pick up and deliver parcels more cheaply than Royal Mail, they have managed to remove the unreliable state-backed giant from the equation.

This, in one well-wrapped package, is SendSocial.com, which launches to the public tomorrow.

As Cumbrian-based chief executive Glen Richardson, 27, puts it: "Why take a parcel down to the local post office, sit in the queue and pay £5 when you can sit in front of your computer and have a courier turn up at your door the next day?"

SendSocial's pricing starts at £3.99 for parcels weighing up to 2kg, rising to £7.99 for one weighing between 5kg and 10kg.

The service works by letting the intended recipient known that someone wants to send them something. It asks, via social messaging site Twitter.com or email, whether they want to receive the parcel and, if they do, where they want it delivered. All this information is stored securely on SendSocial, using the Verisign system of encryption.

The sender is then given a barcode address that tells the courier where the parcel is to go but does not reveal any address details to the sender, who will need a printer to print out the barcode label. The next day the courier turns up and between three and four days later the parcel is delivered.

How SendSocial came to be is a tale of the times: an idea posted on an open blog in March by serial British entrepreneur Ben Way, 29, who is now based in Florida; then some furious online collaboration involving entrepreneurs who did not meet physically or even know each other particularly well; finally some viral marketing on Twitter with the neat twist that the first 100 people who agreed to spread the word were given free profit-share stakes in the company.

The initial stumbling block was over the ability of an internet start-up to physically handle such a volume of parcels. But this was overcome when the now eight-strong team realised that if they could find a courier partner prepared to alter their logistics systems to cope with "address-less" packages then SendSocial could concentrate on building the software and becoming a secure repository of customer addresses.

They spotted a press release from courier myHermes, which was launching a competitively priced national door-to-door service, and things went from there.

The team, which includes Viapost.com chief executive Simon Campbell and 18 year-old Newcastle internet entrepreneur Jonathan Grubin, all operate from different locations and worked on the project using Google docs.

Richardson thinks SendSocial's potential is enormous. While the initial target is social media users, the system should appeal to mainstream retailers and direct marketing groups looking to provide a better customer experience. Some large companies are already recognising this potential. Richardson says greeting cards are likely to be next in their sights and early next year, a large US courier company is likely to send SendSocial global.