ePostal News articles from April 2007

ePostal News archives from April 2007

EC to assemble stakeholders group to advise on RFID policy.
April 2, 2007... Concerned over privacy and security hazards posed by the spread of RFID technology--and at the same time worried that over-regulation could retard RFID development--the European Commission is going to create a so-called stakeholders' group...

UPS claims enhancements save customers time & money.
April 2, 2007... UPS says it's making it easier for customers to do business by enhancing its WorldShip, Quantum Views and Billing Solutions technology. The enhancements are supposed to save customers time and money by streamlining the preparation,...

SAVR reportedly creates smart drop box.(SAVR Communications)(Brief article)
April 2, 2007... SAVR Communications, the RFID house, has reportedly developed a smart drop box that can alert express couriers in real-time when a package is there. There are some 100,000 drop boxes in the US and couriers drop by every day to collect any...

FedEx disappoints.
April 2, 2007... FedEx reported earnings of $1.35 a share for the quarter ended February 28, three cents below last year. It complained of a slowing economic environment, lower fuel surcharges and severe winter storms, with the storm impact estimated to have...

Change of guard at Pitney Bowes.
April 2, 2007... Pitney Bowes has named Murray Martin both president and CEO, replacing Michael Critelli who now becomes executive chairman, a new position. Martin had been president and chief operating officer since 2004. Critelli is now supposed to be...

Global-Z responds to post Italiane recoding.(Global-Z International)(Brief article)
April 2, 2007... Vermont-based Global-Z International, which specializes in the data processing of international mailing addresses for global direct marketers, says it's enhanced its Italy data processing service to help mailers update their Italian address...

Belgians to pay by cell phone.
April 2, 2007... Belgians are going to be able to make purchases using their mobile phone thanks to a new arrangement between payment systems vendor SA Banksys NV, the country's debit card operator, and local cell phone operators France Telecom-owned Mobistar,...

Oracle sues SAP for theft.
April 2, 2007... Oracle has sued its great rival SAP in a federal court in San Francisco claiming that the German company broke into its computers and stole massive amounts of its customer support material, including copyrighted software updates, bug fixes,...

Computer industry turns cannibal.
April 2, 2007... We've been waiting for projections like this to come down. IDC says that virtualization and multi-core chips are going to cost the computer industry 4.5 million x86 server shipments and $2.4 billion in customer spending between now and...

The gods must love Oracle.(financial news)(Financial report)
April 2, 2007... Consolidation evidently agrees with Oracle. It reported fiscal Q3 earnings, up 36% year-over-year to $1 billion, or 20 cents a share, on revenues of $4.4 billion, up 27%, beating its own estimates across all product lines and all...

TPC-C benchmark replacement ready.(Transaction Processing Performance Council )(Brief article)
April 2, 2007... There is now a new TPC benchmark, a successor to the famed 15-year-old TPC-C yardstick for comparing OLTP performance. The Transaction Processing Performance Council has finally put it out after working on it for ever so long. TPC-E...

AMD's pyrrhic victory.
April 2, 2007... AMD may be teetering on the brink of financial disaster but if it does go down for the count it can comfort itself with the knowledge that it made it to eight-largest semiconductor house in the world last year, up from 15th on the back of a...

Rwanda & Kenya to use Google Apps.
April 2, 2007... Under separate deals, the schools and government ministries of Rwanda and the universities of Kenya are going to start using Google Apps, Google's free hosted software consisting of Gmail, word processing and spreadsheets, calendaring, instant...

Ellison to Red Hat: 'hide your wives & daughters. We're coming'.(Larry Ellison )(Brief article)
April 2, 2007... During its earning call CEO Larry Ellison uttered the first words out of Oracle's mouth about its hijacking Red Hat Linux since it opened its front against Red Hat at the end of October. Despite recent press speculation that it's all been a...

Novell to try its hand at powering thin clients.
April 2, 2007... Novell is going into the thin client business with a server-based version of SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop and an image-creation toolkit that resellers can configure, sort of like a poor man's Citrix or Sun Ray. A California school...

NBC, News Corp plot YouTube's comeuppance.
April 2, 2007... NBC Universal and News Corp say they are going to take on Google and its content-threatening $1.65 billion YouTube acquisition and create their own free ad-based online video site legally featuring movies, full-length TV shows and clips that...

US leads in malware: Symantec.
April 2, 2007... Now here's a distinction it would be best not to have. According to Symantec, a third of all malware attacks worldwide, including phishing, spam and bot infections, came from the US in the second half of last year, ahead of China (10%) and...

UPS launches web-based intercept service.
April 9, 2007... UPS has launched Delivery Intercept, an automated service that lets shippers intercept and reroute packages before they're delivered. UPS says it's the industry's only web-enabled package interception service. The shipper using a UPS...

Hongkong Post outsources its lagging e-Cert service.
April 9, 2007... Hongkong Post (HKP) has outsourced operation and maintenance of its e-Cert service to E-Mice Solutions (HK) Limited following an open tender last year. The third-party contractor's four-year contract kicked off April 1. The post says the...

Italian post to go into the mobile phone business.
April 9, 2007... Poste Italiane is going to start selling mobile phone services in partnership with one of the country's four existing cell phone operators by the end of the year. Which one it hasn't said. The post will pay its partner a fee for using its...

Visa pushes into electronic money & mobile commerce.
April 9, 2007... In a move likely to impact the mailstream over time, Visa is pushing into the brave new world of turning cell phones into debit and credit cards and using them instead of checks and cash to pay for goods and services. It has tied up with...

Deutsche post world net opens DHL 'lab of the future'.
April 9, 2007... Deutsche Post World Net has opened a DHL Innovation Center in Troisdorf near Bonn to develop marketable, innovative logistics products. The company said this so-called "laboratory of the future" will form an umbrella organization for all...

Signtrust joins the European Bridge-CA.(Deutsche Post Signtrust)
April 9, 2007... Deutsche Post Signtrust, the so-called trust center of the German Post, has become the youngest member of the European Bridge-CA (EB-CA). That means that all German certification providers are now represented in the initiative. EB-CA is...

MailExpress makes money-back guarantee.(Brief article)
April 9, 2007... MailExpress, an Atlanta-based provider of expedited corporate mail, has announced a 4X money-back guarantee, the first delivery guarantee in the expedited mail industry, it says, attributing its ability to make the offer in part to its...

Q-post buys equipment to replace scratch cards.(Starlink)(Brief article)
April 9, 2007... Qatar's Q-Post has reportedly contracted with Starlink, a local firm, to supply point of sale (PoS) terminals and vending machines to its 30 odd branch offices. The equipment will be used for e-vouchers that would eventually replace the scratch...

Latvia post offers customized postcards.(Brief article)
April 9, 2007... A head of Easter the Latvia Post started offering customized postcards aside customized stamps. People can now create postcards using their own or stock photos and drawings. The post is working with SIA Baltic Growth Partners and Latvia...

Dell finds 'evidence of financial misconduct'.(Brief article)
April 9, 2007... Dell won't be getting its 10-K out any time soon. It's gonna blow through April 3, the day the 10-K is due, and April 18, the extension date. It's gonna add the annual report for the year ended February 2 to the pile of paperwork it already...

Intel to copy some more of AMD's moves.
April 9, 2007... There are times when it looks like AMD is running Intel's design department. This is definitely one of them. Intel has disclosed that it'll be following AMD down the path of squeezing its previously separate memory controller onto the...

Vista numbers.
April 9, 2007... Microsoft says consumers bought 20 million copies of Vista in February, the first month it was out. The number includes copies exchanged for the upgrade coupons Microsoft started handing out last year ahead of the software's availability, OEM...

HP sues Acer for patent infringement.
April 9, 2007... Hewlett-Packard has sued Acer for five counts of patent infringement in Texas, where the federal courts are known for stringing up infringers. Supposedly it's really to keep Acer, which is threatening to leapfrog Lenovo by the end of the...

EC gives Microsoft more time before it's hung.
April 9, 2007... The European Commission, which claims there's no "significant innovation" in Microsoft's server protocols so it shouldn't be asking the royalties it's asking, has given Microsoft an extra 20 days, or until April 23, to defend its royalty...

Microsoft reorgs search.
April 9, 2007... Microsoft has combined its search and AdCenter online advertising operations, units that are supposed to compete against Google, and named the head of its Dynamics CRM line Satya Nadella to run it, reporting to Kevin Johnson. This after...

Dell to factory-install Linux.
April 9, 2007... After 70% of the people who wrote into its newfangled IdeaStorm suggestion box said they would use a Dell with Linux, Dell said that it will start offering Linux pre-installed on select desktops and notebooks. It hasn't said yet what...

Novell catching on: Yankee.
April 9, 2007... As much as it may pain Red Hat, Oracle, the Free Software Foundation--and maybe now IBM--it seems that Novell is actually in resurgence. According to a new survey by the Yankee Group due out next week, 14% of the nearly 1,000 IT managers...

PhotoStamps come unglue.
April 30, 2007... The novelty of Internet-based personalized stamps--the stamps people put their own pictures on or businesses their trademarks--seems to have worn thin. Stamps.com blew a record amount of money promoting the scheme over the holidays, when...

NZ post touts its Linux-SOA infrastructure.(New Zealand)(Brief article)
April 30, 2007... The New Zealand Post is crediting Linux and a new Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) with a 70% cut in IT operating costs, according to a ComputerWorld piece, and the organization is reportedly only 30% of the way through its "transformation."...

Melissa Data acquires Peoplesmith Software.(Smarter Software Inc.)
April 30, 2007... Melissa Data, which sells data quality software and services, has acquired Peoplesmith Software, a company that has produced direct mailing solutions since 1980, on undisclosed terms. Melissa picks up Peoplesmith's software and APIs, most...

Now Earth Class Mail.
April 30, 2007... Reflecting the latest shutter over the poor abused environment, Document Command Inc, which operates its global Remote Control Mail service for delivering postal mail online, has changed its name and that of its service Earth Class Mail...

SteelCloud wins again.(contracts with US Postal Service)(Brief article)
April 30, 2007... SteelCloud Inc, the systems integrator whose multimillion-dollar FRIP contract with the USPS Engineering Department for specialized servers was challenged by a losing rival, says it has won the bid again and that deliveries will continue until...

Arab posts seek more say.(Conference news)(Brief article)
April 30, 2007... Officials of postal administrations from Arab countries are lobbying the Universal Postal Union seeking a greater role in global postal strategies and a task force was appointed to develop a postal strategy for Arab countries at the 14th...

Dell's collapse deepens to HP's benefit.
April 30, 2007... First-quarter PC returns are in and according to Gartner and IDC, Dell's slide continues, HP is still ascendant globally and is severely threatening Dell's primacy in the US, Acer ousted Lenovo from third place globally--or is about to--and...

CEO calls AMD the victim of a 'perfect storm'.
April 30, 2007... AMD's first quarter was a disaster. It's not just that its average selling prices (ASPs) were gutted by the price war with Intel, "80%" of AMD's problems were simply shipments, its CEO Hector Ruiz said. ASPs were only a "small piece"...

So, Google plans to make overheads of its push onto Microsoft'sTurf.
April 30, 2007... Google CEO Eric Schmidt has confirmed one of his tightlipped company's open secrets: it's planning to add a PowerPoint knockoff to Docs & Spreadsheets, its on-demand productivity suite. When exactly Eric didn't say--a Google blog says this...

Microsoft wants Google's DoubleClick acquisition blocked.
April 30, 2007... Spending money like a sailor on shore leave, Google has agreed to pay $3.1 billion cash for DoubleClick, the $150 million-a-year display ad-targeting, cookie-carrying, activity-tracking Silicon Alley firm that was also being pursued by...

Intel appears to be winning the war.
April 30, 2007... Intel's Reagan-like strategy of spending its way out of armed nuclear conflict with AMD seems to be working. The telltale sign is its gross margin. Intel had predicted a dour 49% for the first quarter but when the results came in it...

Lenovo to cut staff to save $100m.
April 30, 2007... Lenovo, which vaulted to third-place globally in PCs on the back of its acquisition of IBM's financially troubled PC operation--but just lost its place to Acer according to Gartner's latest Q1 numbers--said that it is going to try to save $100...

Apparently somebody's gotten over OS/2.
April 30, 2007... Microsoft and Lenovo, the descendent of Microsoft's great enemy IBM, are going to become 50-50 R & D partners and set up a multimillion-dollar technology center at Lenovo's place in Beijing to work on consumer and mobile widgetry such as...

Sun-Fujitsu pact yields 'Sparc Enterprise' line.
April 30, 2007... Ehe Sun-Fujitsu alliance aimed at giving each of them the same high-end mainframe-y Sparc line has resulted in a family of six Solaris 10-based machines dubbed the Sparc Enterprise plugged as the "fastest Sparc servers ever," credited with 50%...

Actually the most secure notebook is one that's never used.
April 30, 2007... China's little-known Tongfang Computer Systems Group claims to have developed the world's most secure notebook, designed specifically for careless high-end business users. It thinks it's going to dominate the high-end notebook market....

Hitachi America fields its second blade server.
April 30, 2007... Hitachi is bring a blade server that it's been selling in Japan since September to the US, claiming it's smaller, lighter, denser and less power-hungry than its IBM and HP rivals. The 6U Xeon quad and dual-core-based BladeSymphony 320 has 10...

'Collaborative software': the next step for open source.
April 30, 2007... Former OSDL CEO Stuart Cohen and his new partner, former Credit Suisse CTO Evan Bauer, have wheeled out their new start-up. The for-profit venture, called the Collaborative Software Initiative (CSI), is supposed to oversee the development or...