ePostal News articles from April 2006

ePostal News archives from April 2006

PRC to arm wrestle USPS over EPM.
April 10, 2006... The Postal Rate Commission (PRC), the USPS' overseer--at least the PRC thinks so--has decided to hear DigiStamps' long-standing complaint that the United States Postal Service has no business being in the electronic postmark business--even...

Postage turns political.
April 10, 2006... BringThemHomeNow.com, a coalition of groups calling on President Bush to bring American troops home from Iraq, has seized on the USPS-authorized idea of designing your own perfectly legal postage stamp to launch a tax day protest by selling an...

New Zealand Post to trash eBill.
April 10, 2006... The New Zealand Post is going to kill off its seven-year-old eBill electronic payment service come late July because of the limited number of customers using it. Some 20 organizations including BNZ Visa & MasterCard use eBill. The last day...

Postbank battles phishing with an e-mail signature.
April 10, 2006... Eighty percent of all online banking users doubt that they could recognize the kind of fraudulent e-mail that's being used in so-called phishing expeditions, according to a study by TNS Infratest, the market research firm. So, the...

Remote control mail goes live.
April 10, 2006... Portland, Oregon-based Document Command Inc has gone live with its anticipated Remote Control Mail service--which will let users manage their postal mail like their email from any computer, PDA or Treo, anywhere in the world, any hour of the...

Russia Post losing money.(Brief article)
April 10, 2006... The Russian postal service is going to lose $36 million this year, its chief executive said last Friday. Speaking at the reopening of St. Petersburg's main post office after it was refurbished, Igor Syrtsov admitted that the company was...

USPS demos next-gen barcodes.
April 10, 2006... The USPS was showing off and evangelizing for its next-generation barcode technology for sorting and tracking mail this week at the National Postal Forum in Orlando, Florida. Generically known as a four-state barcode, this development is...

Parcel return official.(United States Postal Service launches Parcel Return Service )(Brief article)
April 10, 2006... The USPS has made its new Parcel Return Service (PRS), in a two-year pilot beginning in October 2003, official on April 2. Designed for high-volume shippers whose customers return upwards of 50,000 parcels a year, PRS lets approved merchants or...

EC tightens the screws on Microsoft.
April 10, 2006... The European Commission is digging its spurs deeper into Microsoft's flank by opening a new attack on the company's patented business model of bundling widgetry in its operating system. It is telling the company not to bundle certain...

Impact of Vista delay weighed.
April 10, 2006... Microsoft's failure to deliver the market-tickling Vista operating system will cost the industry 2% in sales according to IDC, which still says that PC sales this year will grow better than 10%, a pace it expects to continue through 2008. That...

Quick, somebody get Meg some smelling salts.(Meg Whitman of eBay Inc.)
April 10, 2006... Well, here's a bit of news they managed to keep out of the papers for two months although we can easily imagine eBay CEO Meg Whitman bolting her hairdresser's chair mid-shampoo and running "streaming," so to speak, to her car when they called...

Microsoft forms counter-ODF cheerleaders group.
April 10, 2006... There is now a thing called the Open XML Formats Developer Group that's supposed to be a safe haven for a community of developers interested in using Microsoft's newfangled Open XML formats, the stuff that Microsoft is pushing through the ECMA...

Intel develops a so-called Community PC.
April 10, 2006... Intel's code names are generally educational. Right now it wants people to learn the Sanskrit word for "awakening." It's Jagruti and Intel is using it for an initiative aimed at entrenching it in the Indian market. Intel says it's developed a...

Microsoft rebrands FrontBridge.
April 10, 2006... The FrontBridge hosted messaging service that Microsoft bought last August, now a new best friend of its Exchange mail server, has been renamed Exchange Hosted Services (EHS) and given a new per-user per-month licensing model and a roadmap. ...

Sourcefire acquisition blocked by US government.(Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States)(Brief article)
April 10, 2006... Check Point Software has withdrawn its six-month-old $225 million bid for Sourcefire, because the US Committee on Foreign Investments (CFIUS), the Treasury Department arm that didn't see anything wrong with Dubai managing major American ports,...

Microsoft loses Bristol: a case study.(Bristol City Council ends contract with Microsoft Corp. and signs Sun Microsystems Inc. for its StarOffice application)
April 10, 2006... The city of Bristol in England is switching from Microsoft Office to Sun's StarOffice figuring it can save 60% of its software costs over five years that way. The Bristol City Council says the decision was taken after a full evaluation of...

Centrify upgrades.(Centrify to enhance its DirectControl Suite using Microsoft Active Directory Federation Services )(Brief article)
April 10, 2006... Centrify, the start-up using Active Directory to integrate Unix, Linux, Mac, J2EE and web platforms in the name of single sign-on, is about to upgrade its DirectControl Suite and leverage Microsoft's recently released Active Directory...

Microsoft opens IE complaint department.
April 10, 2006... Oh, my sainted aunt. After all these years Microsoft has finally opened a complaints department for IE. Okay, actually it's for the next-generation IE7. It's a public bug database much like Firefox has. It takes a Microsoft Passport account to...

Centrino may be had quicker than thought: CSFB.
April 10, 2006... Credit Suisse is betting that Intel lost roughly another two points of market share in Q1, following its four-point loss in Q4, but it also says that for AMD to keep eating away at Fortress Intel it's going to have to have OEMs for its high-end...

Eolas is screwing things up.
April 10, 2006... Well, Eolas is having a disruptive effect as feared. Although Microsoft is appealing its patent infringement lose to Eolas, it's still changing the way Internet Explorer handles ActiveX controls related to rich content--impacting how...

First Linux server anti-virus.(BitDefender launches BitDefender Mail Protection email security software)(Brief article)
April 10, 2006... BitDefender, the Romanian golden boy, is going to be making a push into the enterprise with its next-generation email security software for mixed Windows and Linux environments. The anti-virus/anti-spam BitDefender Mail Protection for...

UPU adopts digital postmark standards.
April 17, 2006... The Universal Postal Union (UPU) has adopted new regulations that are supposed to pave the way to the interoperability of digital postmarks between posts worldwide and make the market bigger. It is estimated that up to 50 million...

Spanish Post Office to use PDAs.
April 17, 2006... After running a pilot in Madrid and Toledo, the Spanish Post Office intends to equip an initial 2,400 mailmen with PDAs at a cost of two million euros. The PDAs will register all the information connected with urgent shipments. Correos...

Freepostit reportedly popular with Indian community.
April 17, 2006... ePOSTIT's freepostit.com service says its free e-mail to postal address delivery service for India continues to grow by leaps and bounds because of what it calls a "huge global demand" generated by the Indian community living outside of India....

StreamServe moves into Mainland China.
April 17, 2006... StreamServe, the Enterprise Document Presentment (EDP) house, and Carnation Software, a native provider of business communication solutions, have agreed to distribute StreamServe's EDP software in the People's Republic of China....

Pitney buys Ibis.
April 17, 2006... Pitney Bowes' Management Services subsidiary is buying Ibis Consulting, Inc for approximately $67 million. Ibis provides electronic discovery (eDiscovery) services to law firms and corporate clients. The transaction is expected to close this...

BCC adds list rental to its portal.(BCC Software Inc.)(Brief article)
April 17, 2006... BCC Software, a Bowe Bell + Howell company and a developer of high-performance solutions for professional mailers, has added list rental services to its user-exclusive Customer Portal. BCC says customers can now get highly targeted business and...

E-signature start-up gets funding.
April 17, 2006... Seattle-based on-demand e-signature start-up DocuSign has gotten a $10 million second round led by new investor Sigma Partners, whose managing partner joins the board. Existing backers Frazier Technology Ventures and Ignition Partner also...

21 grams gets wherewithal to push into UK.(InnovationsKapital finances)(Brief article)
April 17, 2006... Stockholm-based 21 Grams, a provider of postal management services, has raised a $2.5 million (SEK 20 million) round of financing from the InnovationsKapital. The company says the money will let it grow its business in the Nordic market...

Apple boot camp is recruiting for a new army of users.
April 17, 2006... Well isn't this fun. So proudly contrarian Apple, which just turned 30 a couple of days ago, is going to let its new Intel-based Macs run Windows natively. Guess it's true what we used to say. You can't trust anybody over 30. Apple...

Microsoft reportedly building a processor.
April 17, 2006... Microsoft is reportedly developing a microprocessor--its first--so it can experiment with writing an operating system that takes advantage of multi-cores. Operating systems like Windows and Linux can manage the current crop of dual-cores,...

Corel files to IPO again.
April 17, 2006... Almost three years after being taken private, Corel, which sells the once-proud WordPerfect as a low-cost alternative to Office, is going back to the public trough looking to raise between $120 million and $180 million and net roughly $82.9...

Oracle loses France to SAP.(French government signs SAP AG)
April 17, 2006... The French government is going to standardize its financial, budgetary and accounting systems on SAP and throw Oracle and PeopleSoft out of all its central ministries and regional services. SAP's Public Sector solutions on NetWeaver are...

Firefox hits 10%.
April 17, 2006... Firefox, the Mozilla browser, hit 10% market share in March, according to web analytics house Net Applications, HitLinks, and Surveyware. If the numbers are correct that means that Firefox has gained 3.34% of the market in the last year while...

Plus ca change.
April 17, 2006... AOL has decided to call itself--drum roll, maestro, if you please--AOL. The name change is official, but one wonders how long it will take them to forget and start referring to themselves as America Online again. AOL, by the way, is now down...

Three Chinese firms promise to fly right.
April 17, 2006... The Chinese government has been persuaded to convince--or whatever it is they do over there--three Chinese PC makers to pre-install legal copies of Windows on their machines, an exercise that should return about $250 million, or two cents a...

Intel to beat Dell's time with EMC.
April 17, 2006... Starting in early May Intel is going to resell EMC Clariion storage to its army of 160,000 resellers and distributors worldwide who, in turn, are supposed to sell the midrange Intel-based stuff under their own brands and labels to SMBs. My...

Deutsche Post Standardizes on Informatica.
April 24, 2006... The mail division of Deutsche Post AG, Europe's largest postal service provider, is standardizing on Informatica for data integration. Terms were not disclosed. The post is using Informatica's PowerCenter Advanced Edition as the basis of a...

Swiss Post expands into vanity stamps.(Swiss Post International launches online postage stamps service)(Brief article)
April 24, 2006... Swiss Post has launched WebStamp Private, a service that will let folks create their own postage stamps online. It says that it is now possible for anyone to print stamps on a PC round the clock and that any photo or graphic element can be put...

Medion pre-installs STAMPIT HOME on its PCs.
April 24, 2006... Essen-based consumer electronics peddler Medion AG says it will be pre-installing Deutsche Post's PC franking software STAMPIT HOME on its PCs. It points out that this will make it possible for users who go on the Internet with a new Medion PC...

Bowe Bell + Howell gets into the business continuity biz.(opening a facility in Pennsylvania)
April 24, 2006... Bowe Bell + Howell is going into business continuity business, expanding its service offerings and opening a facility dedicated to the sector in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The company says, "The inclusion of business continuity into our...

Fortis & An Post announce expected MoU.(memorandum of understanding, joint venture planning)(Brief article)
April 24, 2006... Fortis and An Post have announced that they've signed an expected Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that will lead to the creation of a joint venture that provides financial services in Ireland through An Post's network of 1,450 post offices....

UK Post Office renews MoneyGram contract.
April 24, 2006... Britain's Post Office has renewed its multi-year contract with Minneapolis-based MoneyGram, the global money transfer service available at 2,700 post office branches throughout the country. As part of the new deal, the Post Office will be...

Alien Technology to IPO.
April 24, 2006... Alien Technology Corporation, the 11-year-old company that makes low-cost RFID tags based on the Fluidic Self Assembly (FSA) recipe invented at the University of California at Berkeley, has filed to go public in an IPO aimed at bringing in $120...

TPG to cut more jobs because of electronic substitution.(TNT Post Group N.V.)(Brief article)
April 24, 2006... TNT NV has outlined the nature and scale of its planned reorganization of TPG Post's letter sorting centers, part of the Cost Flexibility Master Plan the company announced in 2001. It says it will cut 1,000-1,100 full-time jobs between 2006 and...

Red Hat buys JBoss.
April 24, 2006... So Marc Fleury, having failed to cut a deal with Oracle, got his valuation and pledge of independence out of the usually tightwad Red Hat. Red Hat is going to pay a possible $420 million for open source middleware enfant terrible JBoss,...

Spoiling Oracle's spoiler.(Brief article)
April 24, 2006... Solid Information Technology, the proprietary database house born in Finland and currently living in Silicon Valley, a few of whose people went off and started little Innobase Oy--the company whose storage engine is so crucial to MySQL that...

Microsoft to take its protocol beef to court.
April 24, 2006... Microsoft intends to bring its gripe with the European Commission over its communications protocols to the Court of First Instance just as we expected it would. Microsoft's week-long appeal of the EC's antitrust verdict is scheduled to...

Underdog's results boast share expansion.
April 24, 2006... AMD blew out Wall Street's Q1 earnings estimates when it delivered $185 million, or 38 cents a share, in income on revenues of $1.33 billion, up 8.6% year-over-year. Consensus was for 29 cents. AMD said its operating income was $259 million....

Salesforce gets legs, buys Sendia.(Brief article)
April 24, 2006... The ink wasn't even dry on the Salesforce.com press release saying it had solved its increasing chronic problems staying up--or at least that it had succeeded in staying up last month--when it went down again, costing it points on ye olde stock...

IBM tests hybrid database.
April 24, 2006... IBM has launched an open test drive of its next-generation SOA-informed DB2 data server code named Viper prior to its release mid-year. IBM thinks it's got the competition beat hands-down with this rev. It says the widgetry is the...

IBM claims security breakthrough.
April 24, 2006... To deal with all the eavesdroppers, spies and old-fashioned thieves who inhabit the Internet, IBM has come up with a mainframe-inspired strong encryption technology for chips that it's code named Secure Blue. The do-hickey is supposed to...

Microsoft could be shunned in Minnesota as well as Boston.
April 24, 2006... The state of Minnesota may skip down the same path as the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and legislate against Microsoft and in favor of the OpenDocument Format (ODF). A bill requiring state agencies to use ODF has been introduced in the...

Sun to open source 'jewel'.(Sun Microsystems Inc. to open source its Java Studio Enterprise software)(Brief article)
April 24, 2006... Sun says it will open source major elements of Java Studio Enterprise, which Sun calls the "crown jewel" of its development tools, as a project on NetBeans.org. The new project will be released as the NetBeans Enterprise Pack. The IDE...

Ah, but can you run Vista.(Microsoft Windows Vista)(Brief article)
April 24, 2006... Gartner has decided that about half of all the corporate PCs out there won't be able to run Vista if and when it finally gets here because Vista will require at least 1GB of RAM (throw in another 512MB for virtualization) and a graphics card...