ePostal News articles from April 2009

ePostal News archives from April 2009

USPS Faces Fiscal Armageddon: Postmaster General.
April 6, 2009... Jack Potter, the Postmaster General of the United States, told a House subcommittee last week that the USPS is going broke and if the recession continues much longer it'll be a toss-up which bills other than salaries get paid. He described...

UK Post Gets Dolled Up for Pictures.
April 6, 2009... The UK Post Office is going to start renewing drivers' licenses using some fancy new cutting-edge technology under a five-year contract with the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA). The enhanced service means that from next spring...

Slovenia Post Gets e-Storage Accreditation.(Brief article)
April 6, 2009... Slovenia Post is one of the first companies in Slovenia to get official accreditation from the Government Archives Office to retain e-documents and archives in digital form. The accreditation confirms that "Slovenia Post E-Archives" has a...

Deutsche Post Extends Go Green.
April 6, 2009... Deutsche Post DHL is offering business customers international carbon-neutral mail, an extension of the Go Green program that saw 100 million carbon-neutral mail items sent inside Germany last year. DHL says the move is in response to demand....

3M Leans on Poste Italiane for New Web Site.(Website overview)
April 6, 2009... 3M Italia and Poste Italiane have collaborated on the development of the new e-commerce site www.3Mshop.it, which is selling various articles from Post-its to a new digital micro projector. 3M is the first multinational operating in Italy to...

eBay & DHL Stay Cozy.
April 6, 2009... eBay Germany and DHL have extended their cooperative arrangement until the end of 2010. They've had a deal since 2004. Over 14.5 million active German eBay members send several million letters and parcels through DHL and Deutsche Post every...

Deutsche Post Buys New Sorting Technology.(Siemens Mobility Division)(Brief article)
April 6, 2009... Deutsche Post is buying 97 Open Mail System-type flat sorting machines from Siemens Mobility Division that are supposed to make it the fastest sorter in the business. The widgetry, due to be deployed in 2010 through the end of 2012, is...

Ariba Teams with DocuSign.(Brief article)
April 6, 2009... Ariba, the on-demand spend management software house, is going to embed DocuSign's electronic signature widgetry in its contract management software so it can offer customers a complete on-demand solution for automating the entire contract...

EC Delays Merger OK.
April 6, 2009... The European Commission is dragging its heels another 10 days in deciding whether to rubber stamp the proposed merger of the Swedish and Danish postal services or launch a four-month investigation. The new deadline is now April 21. Competitors...

New Zealand Cuts Pick-Ups.
April 6, 2009... Starting in mid-April the New Zealand Post is going to cut pick-ups from mail collection boxes from six to five days a week in response to the global economic mess. Mail from 4,800 post boxes nationwide is currently collected on Saturday...

Deutsche Post Cracks Open A Bottle of Champagne.(Brief article)
April 6, 2009... The Deutsche Post has issued a statement welcoming the Dutch government's determination to fully open its mail market by April 1. TNT is probably Deutsche Post's fiercest competitors and German ambitions have been stymied by the closed Dutch...

Deutsche Post Spin-Off Uses Open Source SOA To Bring Eclipse App Development to the Cloud.
April 6, 2009... Deutsche Post spin-off Sopera GmbH has waded into the cloud game with what it calls a next-generation application development platform. The company's Eclipse SOA initiative offers a platform in Eclipse, the IBM-started open source IDE, for...

PB To Resell RISO Printer.
April 6, 2009... Pitney Bowes is going to resell RISO's mid- to high-volume HC5500 color inkjet printers in the US. The printers work with PB products such as its mail management software and inserters. PB says customers will be able to afford to convert...

Microsoft Rips Secret 'Cloudnapping' Manifesto.
April 6, 2009... Microsoft emitted a squeal of protest much like a stuck pig over a secret "Open Cloud Manifesto" that it said was quietly being handed around the industry seeking signoffs. It didn't identify the author or authors of this manifesto - one...

Patches of Rain Fall on IBM's Cloud Manifesto.
April 6, 2009... IBM is, as suspected, the gray eminence behind the "secret" Open Cloud Manifesto that set Microsoft off last week. This is clear from an organizing e-mail that IBM sent out to participants that happened to come this way. The fact that...

Microsoft Nixes Private Use of Azure.
April 6, 2009... Microsoft's unreleased Azure cloud is not meant for private on-premises hosting, the company said. It's strictly a Microsoft data centers-only thing supposedly because some of the new Azure widgetry Microsoft invents is bound to turn up in...

Salesforce To Tweet.
April 6, 2009... Despairing of getting an answer from just about anybody's customer service these days, people are turning instead to Twitter to solve their product problems. And seeing an opportunity to monetize that fact Salesforce.com has promised an...

Sun Upgrades VDI Software.
April 6, 2009... Sun has upgraded its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), expanding the widgetry's operating system repertoire to Windows 2000, OpenSolaris and Ubuntu and its VMware support to multiple copies of vCenter and ever larger desktop deployments....

Google Docs Can Doodle.(Brief article)
April 6, 2009... Google Docs has a new feature called Insert Drawing that can be used to create and insert four-color drawings into documents, presentations and spreadsheets. Google's talking about line drawings, freehand scribbles and text labels and is...

Dell Trades Up to Nehalem.
April 6, 2009... Dell, poor thing, which running to catch up with HP and IBM in servers, has started pushing out its next-generation Nehalem-based servers and workstations, an upgrade that will soon be universal now that Intel formally launched the new Xeon...

IBM-Sun Deal Slow To Cook: Reports.
April 6, 2009... Bloomberg says we may find out this week if IBM and Sun really have a deal or whether Sun is simply continue to disappear over the horizon. IBM is supposedly still doing due diligence. Reuters hears it may take until next week for IBM to...

IBM a Question Mark in Satyam Auction.
April 6, 2009... Satyam, the fraud-reeling Indian outsourcer whose CEO padded the books to the tune of a billion dollars, told local regulators that it's planning to decide which bidder will buy a 51% interest in the company by April 30. It's unclear who...

Cloud Spending To Be Up 21% This Year: Gartner.(Brief article)
April 6, 2009... Gartner thinks that global revenues from cloud computing will surge 21.3% this year and top $56 billion, according to Reuters reporting from Finland. IT spending is obviously shifting in search of cost-effectiveness as the economy goes to...

TomTom Lines Up Big Guns for Microsoft Fight.
April 6, 2009... TomTom, the Dutch GPS player that Microsoft sued a couple of weeks ago for patent infringement specifically charging its Linux kernel with offending, has not only countersued it's lining up allies in a move that practically guarantees a bloody...

Red Hat Profits Slip on Strong Sales.(Financial report)
April 6, 2009... Red Hat's earnings dropped 30% to $16 million, eight cents share, in its fourth quarter ended in February. Revenue was up 18% year-over-year but up only 1% sequentially to $166.2 million. The company's 22-cents-a-share non-GAAP income was...

Novell Ships SLES 11.
April 6, 2009... Novell has patted SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 on the rump and sent the market underdog out into the cold, cold world, wrapping the next-generation operating system up for the next-generation data center and saying it fully supports the latest...

Goldman Does Sun Math.
April 6, 2009... Goldman Sachs did the math and the rumored $8 billion aggregate purchase price for Sun works out to $10.50 a share. It's thinking Sun's got $1.745 billion in cash after subtracting its $1.263 billion in debt from the $3.008 billion it's got in...

Teradata-SAS Team.
April 6, 2009... Teradata is cuddling up with SAS in the name of joint business analytics solutions. They are developing in-database analytic applications that are supposed to improve processing speeds by executing from inside the database. They will initially...

SAS Building $70m Cloud.(Brief article)
April 6, 2009... SAS is building a $70 million 38,000-square-foot cloud facility on its North Carolina campus for its OnDemand offerings and hosted solutions. It will include two 10,000-square-foot server farms. The first will be online by the middle of next...

Google Lays Off Another Couple Hundred.
April 6, 2009... Google said on its web site that it's cutting almost 200 overlapping sales and marketing folk that were hired when it was recruiting willy-nilly before the economy hit a brick wall. It's the second layoff Google has had. The first ever took out...

Deutsche Post Reportedly Wants Piece of Royal Mail.
April 13, 2009... Deutsche Post will be bidding for a stake in the Royal Mail, according to an unconfirmed, unattributed story published over the weekend by the German weekly Welt am Sonntag. Reportedly a dozen Deutsche Post managers under CFO John Allan...

SmartTruck Pilot To Test Quintiq's GPS-Based Software.
April 13, 2009... Deutsche Post DHL is going to test Quintiq's dynamic route planning software as part of its SmartTruck pilot project. It has a contract history with the Dutch company, a supplier of advanced planning and scheduling (APS) widgetry. The...

San Francisco Passes First 'Do Not Mail' Resolution.
April 13, 2009... The San Francisco board of supervisors last week passed a non-binding resolution calling on California to create a Do Not Mail registry so Californians can stop getting unwanted junk mail. It is the first time officials have pushed back...

USPS Crisis Deepens Month-by-Month.
April 13, 2009... The US Postal Service lost $658 million in February, bringing its year-to-date loss for its fiscal year to $1.8 billion. Employee work hours were cut 12%, representing a 7.3% decrease in wages and benefits. Revenue was down 12.8%, worse than in...

Zumbox Signs Second Village.(Brief article)
April 13, 2009... A second American hamlet, the village of Orland Park, has decided to use Zumbox to deliver newsletters and government communications such as water bills to its citizens complements of Zumbox' free online mailboxes. Zumbox, a rival of Earth...

Royal Mail Whips Up Data Concoction.
April 13, 2009... Royal Mail has got a new solution that's supposed to help businesses deliver more relevant and targeted marketing communications and increase sales. Called Data Sure, the widgetry lets businesses upgrade their B2B customer databases in one...

Things Are Not as Bad as the Great Depression: UPU.
April 13, 2009... Postal entities from nearly 90 countries -some of them virtually like USPS Postmaster General Jack Potter - gathered last week to discuss the "Impact of the Economic Crisis on Postal Activities" under the auspices of the Swiss-based Universal...

Melissa Data Integrates with Microsoft's SQL.
April 13, 2009... Melissa Data has got some new software called the Total Data Quality Integration Toolkit (TDQ-IT) that integrates into Microsoft's SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS 2005/2008) to deliver data quality processes such as data profiling,...

Goodmail Launches CertifiedVideo.(Goodmail Systems)(Brief article)
April 13, 2009... Goodmail Systems, the creator of CertifiedEmail, has launched CertifiedVideo, a technology that will let commercial and non-profit organizations incorporate streaming video in the e-mails they send to opted-in recipients. AOL has signed...

Postal Records Turn Genealogy Tools.(British Postal Museum & Archive)(Brief article)
April 13, 2009... The British Postal Museum & Archive is putting Post Office appointment books from 1831 to 1960 online and making the records fully searchable in partnership with Ancestry.co.uk, the genealogical site. It said prior to 1831 appointment records...

USPS Attempts To Turn Lemons into Lemonade.
April 13, 2009... Starting May 6 the United States Postal Service is planning to test market a new service that looks suspiciously like a less-than-truckload (LTL) network. The agency told the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) that the test won't run more than...

Qatar To Host UPS Congress.(Universal Postal Union)(Brief article)
April 13, 2009... The Universal Postal Union (UPU) and the Qatar government have signed an agreement that will lead to the Arab state hosting the next UPU summit, an event that only takes place every four years. The pact formalizes a decision taken at the last...

DAT-Mail Software Certified.
April 13, 2009... Window Book's DAT-Mail software has been certified for producing 24-digit USPS Intelligent Mail tray labels. The new 24-digit barcode label will soon replace the 10-digit and 10/24 transitional barcode labels currently used. The company says...

Cheetah Software and Turnpike Global Forge Alliance.
April 13, 2009... Cheetah Software Systems and Turnpike Global Technologies have partnered to offer transportation companies an integrated logistics intelligence solution. Matching Cheetah's dynamic routing and dispatch optimization with Turnpike's...

IBM Reportedly Pulls Offer for Sun.
April 13, 2009... Sun's board rejected a formal IBM offer for the company Saturday as too low, according to the Wall Street Journal late Sunday. Apparently the price IBM offered was $9.40 a share or less, down from a reported $9.55 late last week. IBM...

Microsoft & TomTom Settle; TomTom Pays Despite GPL.
April 13, 2009... The Linux kernel apparently does in fact infringe on Microsoft's patents - at least that's certainly the way it looks to the casual observer because TomTom has agreed to yank the offending widgetry out of its GPS devices over the next two...

Jaspersoft Delivers First SaaS-Enabled BI Platform.
April 13, 2009... Jaspersoft has moved on to version 3.5, making it the industry's first multi-tenanted SaaS-enabled Business Intelligence platform. It's also got enhanced user and data scalability and new integrated web-based analysis capabilities that don't...

Amazon Turns Numbers Cruncher.
April 13, 2009... Amazon has added Hadoop number crunching to its other cloud skills. It's put out a public beta of a new Web Service called Elastic MapReduce for processing vast amounts of data using a hosted Hadoop framework running on its giant EC2/S3...

Microsoft & IBM Parlay over Cloud Manifesto.
April 13, 2009... Microsoft and IBM, estranged over IBM's high-handedness in dictating a seemingly innocuous Cloud Manifesto that's read as Big Blue's attempt to stamp itself the ultimate leader of the cloud movement met and parlayed at the Cloud Computing Expo...

IBM Pushes a Species of Lotus in the Cloud.
April 13, 2009... IBM has got some cloud-based software that it will host on its own data centers that it calls a survival mechanism in this economy. Formally known as LotusLive Engage, it's promising to be out by April 7. It includes integrated...

EC Delivers Cookie Monster Ultimatum.
April 13, 2009... The European Commission is waving a big stick at Internet companies such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft and threatening to crack down on consumer profiling by online advertisers on the supposition that "basic rights in terms of transparency,...

Parallels Targets Virtualization at Workstation Market.
April 13, 2009... Parallels has launched Workstation Extreme said to be the first high-end workstation virtualization solution to give users near-native performance on resource-intensive applications, widgetry that typically requires extremely large memory,...

eBay Courts Third-Party Developers.
April 13, 2009... eBay is now officially beta testing its subscription-based Selling Manager service as a platform for third-party developers to sell their embedded tools. The space is used by close to 300,000 online merchants to manage their businesses at...

Intel Nehalems Hit the Beach Running.
April 13, 2009... Intel has launched its 45nm quad-core next-generation Nehalem Xeons comparing them to the Pentium Pro of almost 15 years ago, the chip that put the company on the server map. Before the Pentium Pro, the first Intel chip optimized for server...

HP Rolls Out its Nehalem Line.
April 13, 2009... In tandem with Intel's Nehalem 5500 launch, HP rolled out it latest servers claiming that its widgetry is the brightest bulb in the industry's pack and exploits Intel's underlying technology more than most. For starters the so-called G6...

Satyam Seeks To Wring Maximum Price from its Sale.(Satyam Computer Services Ltd.)
April 13, 2009... Satyam, the corrupt Indian outsourcer whose founder lied about its revenues for years, has changed the rules of the redemptive sale of a majority 51% stake in the company. It was supposed to be a sealed bid auction, winner take all. ...

IT Spending Going Backwards.(information technology)(Brief article)
April 13, 2009... Gartner's latest gaze into its crystal ball finds global spending on IT dropping 3.8% this year to $3.2 trillion from $3.4 trillion, with hardware taking it on chin, down 15% to $324.2 billion, IT services down almost 2% to $796 billion and...

HP Tests Android for Netbooks: Journal.
April 13, 2009... HP may dump Windows for Android in some of its netbooks to up its paper-thin margin, according to the Wall Street Journal. The paper says HP's got programmers testing the freebie Linux-based cell phone operating system for a potential...

Microsoft Cops Want Beat Extended.
April 13, 2009... According to Bloomberg the states led by California and New York that were party to the Microsoft antitrust action may seek continued court supervision of the company's business practices for perhaps another three years. All supervision is...

Post Danmark Launches e-Invoicing Service.
April 20, 2009... Post Danmark's eCommunication business unit has launched eComOne, a new electronic invoicing service for businesses. The post says the service relieves companies from having to reach data exchange agreements with each of their individual...

DHL-UPS Talks Fail.(United Parcel Service of America Inc.)(DHL Corp.)(Brief article)
April 20, 2009... Those DHL-UPS talks that have been going on for months and months have hit an apparently unscalable wall. In the wake of DHL's retreat from America, UPS was supposed to take over DHL's domestic package service generating a billion dollars...

Deutsche Post Has Second Thoughts about Royal Mail.
April 20, 2009... A couple of weeks ago a German press story had Deutsche Post interested in a buying the piece of the Royal Mail that the British government has put up for sale. However, last week Deutsche Post CEO Frank Appel suggested it wouldn't happen. He...

Earth Class Mail To Be Made Accessible to the Visually Impaired.(Brief article)
April 20, 2009... Earth Class Mail, the company digitizing postal mail, has teamed up with Bosma Enterprises to bring its online mail-delivery service to the blind or visually impaired. In the first phase of their initiative, Bosma, a non-profit that...

E-Filings Hurt USPS.
April 20, 2009... Well, that's at least $70 million the USPS won't be seeing. According to the Internal Return Service 76.8% of the 2008 federal tax returns filed by April 3, ahead of the April 15 deadline, were filed electronically. That's some 70.9...

Amazon Loosens its Irish Stance.
April 20, 2009... Amazon, which has restricted Irish shoppers to buying only books, music, DVDs and computer games since 2006, has decided to start collecting the government levy required by the local Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) regulation....

DX Group Partners with Cognito.
April 20, 2009... Britain's DX Group (DX) has rolled out a mobile solution equipping its couriers with Honeywell handheld devices based on Cognito's mobile workforce management software to improve the security and delivery efficiency of consignments. The...

FP Austria Wins Order from Austrian Post.
April 20, 2009... Francotyp-Postalia Austria, a subsidiary of the FP Group, has won a major order from the Austrian Post. The Austrian mail services group has ordered FP's centormail BBS for its Salzburg mail distribution center. The centormail BBS is a...

Salary Cuts Challenge Latvia Post: Report.
April 20, 2009... The chairman of the Latvian Post has reportedly threatened to resign on May 1 if his salary is cut 60%. So apparently have other managers threatened with salary cuts, according to local press reports.

Consignee Identity Addressed.(NetDespatch with First Ondemand to develop NetDespatch SecureScan)(Brief article)
April 20, 2009... NetDespatch together with First Ondemand have developed the two-factor NetDespatch SecureScan, a web-based, value-added service that is supposed to positively identify the authorized recipient of goods and secure an authenticated proof of...

E-Mail Marketing Campaigns Hit Social Networks.
April 20, 2009... Yesmail, a provider of permission-based online e-mail marketing solutions, has cut a deal with ShareThis so clients of Yesmail Enterprise can take their e-mail marketing campaigns to social networks such as FaceBook, YouTube, Twitter and Digg...

Oracle Snaps Up Sun.
April 20, 2009... In a brilliant retrieve from the really nasty situation it was in after its deal to get bought by IBM fell apart, Sun surprised everybody who thought it had no options left - which was practically everybody - by turning up this morning with a...

Ex-Sun Scientists Build Cloud Boxes around IBM Servers.
April 20, 2009... The racks and racks and racks of commodity servers that make the Web 2.0 world and now the cloud possible are really lousy at it. They're slow, underutilized, don't scale worth a hoot, eat power and space, and now they're multi-core. They...

McKinsey Slams the Cloud.
April 20, 2009... McKinsey & Company says that outsourcing your typical big corporate or government data center to a cloud service would cost double what it costs to keep the thing in-house. The mighty consultant has run up what it figures is a "hype-free"...

IBM Doesn't Want Sun: CNBC.
April 20, 2009... Well, if rebuffing IBM's $7 billion offer as too low a couple of weekends ago was a negotiating tactic then the gambit has blown up in Sun's face according CNBC. Following a Bloomberg story saying Sun wanted IBM to come back to the table -...

Google's Growth Engine Wheezing.
April 20, 2009... Google's stock briefly bounded past $400 in after-hours trading for the first time since last October on the strength of its Q1 earnings performance. When last seen, however, it had given back the after-hours gains apparently after punters...

Microsoft's First Cloud Server Hits Public Beta.
April 20, 2009... Microsoft has sent Exchange 2010 out into public beta. It's its first server built from the ground up, according to Microsoft, to be deployed in the cloud as an online service as well as on-site. Microsoft expects to start selling the thing...

EMC Creates Monster Cloud Storage.
April 20, 2009... EMC has rolled out a spanking new built-from-the-ground-up high-end storage architecture for the cloud and its federated kin, the virtual data center, a k a the internal cloud, widgetry that's been a couple of years in development. Dubbed...

Intel Calls a Bottom.
April 20, 2009... In reporting the company's numbers Intel CEO Paul Otellini said that "We believe PC sales bottomed out during the first quarter and that the industry is returning to normal seasonal patterns." Seems enough of the haze has burned off for...

HP Takes US Crown Away from Dell.
April 20, 2009... Dell continues to slip. According to the latest numbers out of Gartner and IDC, HP has overtaken Dell in the US PC market for the first time since, gee, 2001. Dell lost the lead worldwide to HP in 2006. In Q1 Dell's US market share...

Infobright Aims To Challenge MPP Data Warehouses.
April 20, 2009... Infobright, the Toronto-based open source data warehousing company, is pushing out rev 3.1 of its low-cost software. It adds x86 Solaris 10 support to its Enterprise Edition and an enhanced SQL Framework to both its Enterprise and Community...

HP Revs HP-UX.
April 20, 2009... HP, whose third-rank Unix franchise could have been really pushed to the back of the bus if Sun took IBM up on its offer a couple of weeks ago and they combined forces, has enhanced its Serviceguard software and its HP-UX 11i operating...

Cast Iron Protects Corporate Data on Google Cloud.
April 20, 2009... Cast Iron Systems has widgetry to encrypt the exchange of data between a company's firewalled enterprise apps and Google's cloud. Cast Iron for Google Apps, which includes Google's Secure Data Connector, is supposed to make it easier for...

eBay To Dump Skype.
April 20, 2009... A market-pressured eBay with enough problems of its own says that it's going to spin off Skype, the mostly free computer-to-computer VoIP software that it paid an over-the-top $2.6 billion for in late 2005 with a $1.5 billion earn-out that...

Yahoo & Microsoft Talking Again: Reports.
April 20, 2009... Quoting unnamed sources the Dow Jones All Things Digital blog reported that Yahoo and Microsoft have started sounding each other out again about a search and ad partnership and said Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer and Yahoo's new CEO Carol Bartz...