ePostal News articles from August 2004

ePostal News archives from August 2004

Stamps.com To Pilot a New PC Postage Product.
August 2, 2004... PC postage house Stamps.com says it's gotten the goahead from the US Postal Service to test a new unnamed Netstamp-like offering whose look-and-feel can be customized. NetStamps lets people print out sheets of postage in any denomination for...

Post Danmark Dumps its Stake in E-Marketplace.
August 2, 2004... Post Danmark, the Danish post office, and its three joint venture partners have sold their positions in the gatetrade. net B2B electronic marketplace to Consolidated Holdings. Founded in 2001, gatetrade's other owners included Danske Bank,...

Two Vie for Top UPU Post.(Universal Postal Union)(Brief Article)
August 2, 2004... There are two candidates in the race to be director general of the Universal Postal Union: La Poste's Edouard Dayan and Portugese Post's Carlos Silva. Dayan is director of European and international affairs at France's Groupe La Poste;...

Certipost Launches eID Store.(eID Shop )(Brief Article)
August 2, 2004... Belgium Post's Certipost venture has teamed with Zetes to launch an online store called the eID Shop to sell development tools for Belgium's electronic identity card project, the largest perspective government deployment of Sun Java smart cards...

e-Boks Gets New Investor.(Brief Article)
August 2, 2004... Electronic payment services house PBS is acquiring the one-third stake that's held by IT outsourcing services firm DMdata in e-Boks, Post Danmark's secure electronic bill and statement delivery and archiving joint venture. PBS is owned by a...

SBC Adds 315,000 Broadbanders, Total Hits 4.3m.(Brief Article)
August 2, 2004... Regional telco SBC Communications ended Q2 with 4.3 million digital subscriber lines for broadband Internet access, having added 315,000 in the June quarter. SBC and the other phone companies have experienced a continuing decline in local phone...

DSL Prime Drippings.(Digital subscriber line modems)
August 2, 2004... Dave Burstein's DSL Prime newsletter is a must-read for those who work in broadband. For those who don't, but want an idea of what he's seeing, we'll summarize a few points: - China builds a phone network the size of Verizon every year. -...

Microsoft Profits Up 82% but Still Miss Forecast.(Brief Article)
August 2, 2004... Microsoft's profits spiked an enviable 82% in the June quarter because of an improved IT spending environment that translated into strong PC and server shipments. Despite this impressive showing, Microsoft missed Wall Street's projections,...

Microsoft Buys Search Start-up.(Lookout Software LLC)
August 2, 2004... Microsoft has acquired little Lookout Software LLC on the usual undisclosed terms to bolster what its strategically important MSN Search service can do. The move is not without its ironies considering that Lookout was created by former...

Enterprise Software Was Hit by an Irrationally Exuberant Trolley Car.(Brief Article)
August 2, 2004... "We performed a post-mortem on the enterprise software industry and concluded that while deal closure rates fell off as the second quarter drew to a close -- impacted by continued pricing pressure, some vertical experiencing weakness [sic], and...

Powell Takes Some of the Credit for Wi-Fi Boom.(Brief Article)
August 2, 2004... FCC chairman Michael Powell has taken some of the credit for the Wi-Fi boom in the US by claiming it was caused by a more relaxed approach to spectrum licensing. Powell said the explosion of wireless usage was an entirely unplanned...

Spyware, Viruses, Spam Trouble Consumers.(Brief Article)
August 2, 2004... Dell says that 20% of the calls to its consumer help lines are related to spyware and viruses. This publication has repeatedly said that unless spam, spyware and viruses are controlled, the evolution of the digital home will falter. People...

Oh, Great, a Pocket PC Virus.(Brief Article)
August 2, 2004... One of the emotionally troubled 29A VX virus-writing group, which wrote the Cabir virus for the Symbian operating system, has created the first known Pocket PC phone and handheld virus, a thing dubbed WinCE4.Dust, a so-called proofof- concept...

Canada Post Takes New Tack on EPM.
August 9, 2004... Canada Post has formed a partnership with AuthentiDate that will see the post relinquish active development of its Electronic Postmark to AuthentiDate. The post, however, made it clear that it was definitely not abandoning the Electronic...

Russian Post Gives Stodgy Money Orders a Boost.(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... Russian Post says implementation of the CyberDengui or Cyber Money Order program has significantly cut the delivery time and cost of money orders. The Cyber Money Order scheme has reportedly enabled the post to cut the fees for postal...

PostX Gets New CEO.(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... Secure electronic messaging services PostX has gotten itself a new CEO in Cayce Ullman, PostX' CTO of since 2001. Ullman succeeds Thampy Thomas, who continues as chairman.

South Carolina Gives EPM a Fillip.(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... South Carolina became the first US state to make e-mail using a USPS Electronic Postmark Service the equivalent of conventional Certified or Registered Mail. E-mail using the USPS' EPM has been added to South Carolina's recently adopted...

Malaysia Post in E-Money Transfer Deal.(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... Pos Malaysia Berhad has inked a deal with Western Union to provide electronic money transfers. The arrangement will enable the post to offer customers the ability to send and receive money in minutes. The post plans to offer the service at 30...

Kenya Post To Offer Internet Cards.(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... The Postal Corporation of Kenya and SimbaNet/Africa 1 have teamed up to peddle Africa 1 Internet cards through the post office. The cards reportedly let customers subscribe and renew their Internet access services without visiting the ISP's...

Cable TV Broadband To Hit 69.4m by 2008.(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... Cable TV companies, in a race with the phone companies, are expected to have 69.4 million subscribers by 2008, up from the current 32.9 million, according to IDC. The phone companies have the edge in market share in every country except the US,...

The Broadband Providers.(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... * Phone companies Dominate globally but only have about a third of the US market and now use low prices to attract subscribers. The cable companies will increasingly challenge them on speed but are counting on fiber optics to save the day. The...

Broadband Driver - 44m Americans Now Work at Home.
August 9, 2004... We sometimes overlook an obvious factor driving the growth of broadband at home the increasing ubiquitous at-home worker. The spread of low-cost, high-speed Internet access coupled with business relying on e-mail to communicate makes...

India's 'Sleeping' Software Giant IPOs.(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... India's biggest software exporter, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), the software arm of the huge $12-billion-a-year Tata conglomerate, one of the country's two biggest, has gone public. It's the biggest IPO India has ever seen, raising...

The Phone Company's Nightmare.(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... Internet telephony, otherwise known as VoIP, could grow to 27 million users about 19% of Internet's users, says market researcher Ipsos-Insight. Lynne Bartos, senior VP of the cable, media and entertainment practice for Ipsos-Insight,...

Microsoft Debuts Newsbot Pilot.(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Google should be pleased that Microsoft has taken another page from its book. Microsoft's MSNBC operation has rolled out a beta of a news aggregation service powered by the company's new...

Office 2003 SP1 Out.(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... Microsoft has put Service Pack 1 for Office 2003 up on its web site. Besides the usual bug fixes and reliability enhancements, SP1 includes new features for the OneNote 2003 notetaking program and the InfoPath 2003 electronic forms...

Documentum Gets ILM-ized.(Information Lifecycle Management strategy)
August 9, 2004... Furthering its Information Lifecycle Management strategy, EMC has rolled out an add-on product for its Documentum software that will let people set storage policies that automate the placement and movement of content across a tiered...

One Thing's For Sure, Spanking's Too Good for Him.(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... Sven Jaschan, the 18-year-old German brat arrested in May for unleashing the destructive Sasser and Netsky worms after a tip to Microsoft from one of his friends identified him, was responsible for 70% of all virus activity in the first half,...

PostX Debuts Upgrade, Eyes Profitability (Again) in Q4.
August 16, 2004... Secure electronic messaging provider PostX has upgraded its core software and has -- once again -- claimed it will be profitable soon. PostX software is designed so businesses with paper-intensive and sensitive communications can send out...

Stamps.com Starts Test Marketing PhotoStamps.
August 16, 2004... Stamps.com has launched a novel new version of its PC postage service that will let people turn digital photos, designs or images into valid US postage, something the Post Office would have regarded as sacrilege not all that long ago. ...

eBay Days in San Jose Post Offices.(US Postal Service)(Brief Article)
August 16, 2004... The US Postal Service and eBay teamed up and promoted their partnership the other day through "eBay Days" at post offices in San Jose, California, the tail end of Silicon Valley. eBay stationed trading assistants at the post offices to...

FedEx Buying Parcel Direct To Target E-Tail Sector.(Brief Article)
August 16, 2004... FedEx said Monday that it's acquiring parcel consolidator Parcel Direct for $120 million in cash to target the fastgrowing e-tail and catalog sectors. FedEx said e-tail and catalogs players are looking for a costeffective way to ship...

Gee, Did Munich Spit in the Wind?
August 16, 2004... The city of Munich's vaunted LiMux project to move its 14,000 workers from Windows to Linux -- a spit in the eye of Microsoft, whose CEO flew to Germany last year to try to save the account and couldn't, even though he came bearing handsome...

W3C Teams with OMA.(World Wide Web Consortium and Open Mobile Alliance)(Brief Article)
August 16, 2004... The World Wide Web Consortium and the Open Mobile Alliance, a group of 350 global concerns, have allied. They intend to collaborate on specifications for mobile access to the web, according to the memorandum of understanding they signed. ...

Where Should We Send the Bill?(spam messages)(Brief Article)
August 16, 2004... Spammers sent out 2.981 billion e-mails between January 1 and July 30, according to London-based digital risk assessor mi2g, and are obviously galloping to better last year's total of 1.6 trillion spam messages. Mi2g says these vermin have...

The Alphabet Soup of DSL, ADSL, VDSL.(digital subscriber line, asymmetric digital subscriber line, very high bit-rate DSL)
August 16, 2004... DSL is the accepted moniker for the broadband service that the phone companies have offered in competition with the cable companies' cable modem technology. Because most phone companies have only offered one kind of DSL until recently,...

Free & the Future of Broadband Pricing.
August 16, 2004... Broadband-over-power-lines will be with us, certainly in the US, as a commodity in two years, maybe three. It's underpinned with a CPE cost of about $200, installation costs of about $150 per line and could take the price of 3 Mbps broadband to...

BT Cuts Broadband Prices, Adds Grading.(British Telecommunications PLC)(Brief Article)
August 16, 2004... BT has reduced the prices on its various broadband offerings, making a move like the DSL providers in the states made in their fight against the cable broadband outfits: - BT Broadband (512 Kbps) -- down from u27 a month to u24.99. - BT Yahoo...

Mobile Ticketing Will Boost M-commerce.(Brief Article)
August 16, 2004... Mobile ticketing applications -- he ones that let consumers buy movie, theater, train and bus tickets -- are on track to become a $39 billion industry by 2009, according to Juniper Research. Digital content such as music, games and...

FedEx Debuts New Software for Online Printing.
August 23, 2004... FedEx Kinko's has extended its digital document management abilities by whipping up a new software tool meant to give users a virtual printer cable linked to Kinko's 1,100 Office and Print centers in the US. Dubbed File, Print FedEx...

Canada Post CEO Quits in Flap.(Brief Article)
August 23, 2004... Canada Post president and CEO Andr Ouellet has capitulated to pressure and stepped down. Ouellet quit amid a controversy over his travel and entertainment expenses, as well as his hiring and contracting practices. A Deloitte & Touche audit...

Pitney Enhances Shipping Software.(Brief Article)
August 23, 2004... Pitney Bowes has upgraded its multi-carrier Ascent package management and its PB TMS transportation management software. Both now include a Residential Delivery Indicator. Since some carriers apply a surcharge on residential deliveries, RDI...

Deutsche Post Upgrades Address Update Service.(Brief Article)
August 23, 2004... Deutsche Post Direkt has expanded its address updating and enrichment service. Aimed at meeting the needs of small and mid-sized businesses, the enhancement lets people check addresses online. Dubbed Addressfactory Prepaid, the new service...

Kenya Post Seeks Internet Gateway License.(Brief Article)
August 23, 2004... The Postal Corporation of Kenya has applied to the Communications Commission of Kenya for an Internet gateway license. Counting its application, nine firms have applied for licenses to operate Internet node and backbone services in the...

Q-Post Plans IPO.(Quatar's General Postal Corporation)(Brief Article)
August 23, 2004... Q-Post, Quatar's General Postal Corporation, plans to go public and list on the Doha Securities Market sometime in the next three years.

Microsoft Hits Stay Hurdle.
August 23, 2004... The judge who's going to decide whether Microsoft rates a stay on the antitrust penalties imposed on the company by the European Commission in March has previously hinted that he might prove hard to convince. The other day at a hearing he...

Trivia.(Brief Article)
August 23, 2004... The web is currently growing by about 20 terabytes of compressed data a month.

Is Carly Toast Yet? By Maureen O'Gara.(Brief Article)
August 23, 2004... Besides poor execution and the shortfall in storage, Carly blamed her problems on hiccups with a new SAP order-processing and supply chain system that HP installed in the US, channel compensation issues and aggressive discounting in Europe and...

Microsoft Experiments with Regional Pricing.
August 23, 2004... Microsoft has launched a 12-month pilot program to offer a special, lightweight, low-cost, Linux-fighting version of Windows XP in five developing countries, the first time it has ever deviated from its policy of a single, globally imposed...

Deutsche Telekom Approaches 5m Broadband Users.(Brief Article)
August 23, 2004... Broadband is booming, Deutsche Telekom proclaimed when it reported that its T-Online Internet division now has almost 4.86 million DSL customers. Of that, 4.7 million are in Germany, up 750,000 -- 17% -- since the end of 2003, and 186,000 are...

Swiss ISPs Battle for Broadband Wire Access.(Internet service providers)(Brief Article)
August 23, 2004... The demand that cable TV companies open their infrastructure to third-party broadband providers has spread to Switzerland. Three Swiss ISPs -- Init Seven, CyberLink Internet Services and Netstream -- have asked the Swiss government's Weko...

Everyday Use of Web Grows.(Brief Article)
August 23, 2004... The non-profit Pew Internet & American Life Project's survey of almost 1,400 Internet users found the net most useful for getting information and communicating with family and friends. Nearly 90% of Americans who go online said the Internet...

XP SP2 RTMs.
August 23, 2004... Microsoft's latest delay in getting its important securityenhancing XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) to market proved transitory. It has patted the thing on its fat little 80MB rump and sent it along to manufacturing. It's also set up for automatic...

HP To Buy UK IT Services Firm.(Brief Article)
August 23, 2004... Hewlett-Packard is paying $300 million cash for UK IT services house Synstar. The deal is in line with HP's re-thought strategy of making smaller services acquisitions. In March, it bought German IT services provider Triaton GmbH for an...

WS-Addressing Spec Sent to W3C.(Brief Article)
August 23, 2004... That sometime threesome -- IBM, Microsoft and BEA -- who wrote the WS-Addressing web services specification are sending the thing to W3C for standardization and Sun and SAP are backing the submission. WS-Addressing creates an interoperable...

Sun Ray Thin Clients To Run Off Linux Servers.(Brief Article)
August 23, 2004... Sun, which would really rather sell Solaris, says it's planning to let its Sun Ray thin clients run off Linux servers as well as Solaris servers. Sun said it would be available "soon," which in Sun's mouth can mean anything. Sun Rays,...

Is Microsoft's Antivirus in Alpha?(Brief Article)
August 23, 2004... Piper Jaffray says there's been an unverified report that Microsoft's anticipated antivirus program is in alpha and that "based on historical trends this would put a standalone Microsoft antivirus release eight-18 months out." Meanwhile,...

Somebody Clean Out This Closet.(Open Source Initiative )(Brief Article)
August 23, 2004... The Open Source Initiative currently recognizes some 53 open source licenses, which has already got to be about 50 open source licenses too many but reports suggests OSI is going to add a couple more to the list. See www.opensource.org/...

HP Exec To Chair Grid Forum.(Brief Article)
August 23, 2004... The Global Grid Forum (GGF) has tapped Mark Linesch, VP of HP's Adaptive Enterprise Program as its next chair succeeding Charlie Cattlet who's had the position for the last five years. GGF regards itself as the pre-eminent grid standards...

Conspiracy Theorists, Take Note.(Brief Article)
August 23, 2004... Vintela Inc, a sister of SCO's by virtue of being funded out of the same Canopy Group pocket and a partner of Microsoft's by virtue of their mutual interest in Unix and Linux, says it's extended SMS to seamlessly manage Unix, Linux and Mac OS X...

Wyse Goes with Latest Linux Kernel.(Brief Article)
August 23, 2004... Wyse says it's got the first Linux thin client based on the new 2.6 kernel although the thing won't appear until Q4. It calls its OS Wyse Linux V6 and has put it in a box called the Winterm 5150SE that runs on a low-power AMD Geode GX 533...

.Post Domain Passes First Hurdle.
August 30, 2004... The Universal Postal Union's application to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the Internet authority, for a .post sponsored top-level domain (sTLD) has gotten past its first hurdle and moved to the next stage. ...

SAP Snags USPS Software Deal.
August 30, 2004... German-based enterprise software giant SAP has landed a multi-year contract to provide the US Postal Service with a new human resources management system to streamline its business processes. The contract is reportedly valued at about $35...

Deutsche Post's Austria Post Deal in Doubt.(Brief Article)
August 30, 2004... Deutsche Post's plans to take a majority stake in Austria Post may collapse for want of political support, according to the Financial Times. The paper quoted a spokesman for the Austrian OVP party, Gunter Stummvoll, as saying, "Why should...

Jamaican Post Offices To Be Free Net Access Points.(Brief Article)
August 30, 2004... The Jamaican government is rolling out a $5 million program to provide free Internet access to the poor. Jamaica's minister of commerce, science and technology Phillip Paulwell said the e-Jamaica initiative would establish 60 Internet...

Swiss Post in e-Ticketing Pilot.(Brief Article)
August 30, 2004... Swiss Post's financial services unit PostFinance has teamed with the Kudelski Group to launch a novel electronic ticket pilot that will let PostFinance customers use their electronic Postcards to pay for admission to events and ski lifts. The...

Group 1's Waggoner in New Role.(Group 1 Softwareappoints Tim Waggoner)(Brief Article)
August 30, 2004... Pitney Bowes subsidiary Group 1 Software has named Tim Waggoner executive VP of product development and operations for its Enterprise Solutions Division. Wagonner was previously Group 1's CTO. In his new role, he will be responsible for the...

Eolas Loses Again.(Brief Article)
August 30, 2004... For the second time in a row, the US Patent and Trademark Office has rejected the patent claims of Eolas over Microsoft. Eolas only has one more shot at being vindicated by the PTO otherwise it looks like it won't be cashing any billion-dollar...

Microsoft's 64-bit x86 OSes Inch Ahead.(Brief Article)
August 30, 2004... Microsoft has started circulating the latest builds of its 64-bit XP Professional and Server 2003 Enterprise Edition, the stuff that will run on AMD64s and Intel's look-alike EM64T chips. The XP kit has now been officially dubbed XP...

XP SP 2 Bedeviled.(Brief Article)
August 30, 2004... Besides breaking other programs and cultivating a "waitand- see" attitude on the part of wary business users, the new Windows XP Service Pack 2, an important security update as far as Microsoft is concerned, has been chalking up reports of...

ClearCube Gets Another $25 mil.
August 30, 2004... ClearCube Technology, the Texas company that's going around -- with the help of such as IBM Global Services -- morphing desktop PCs into so-called PC blades, the first serious rethinking of the PC since the widget was invented, has gotten...

Carly's Problems Just Got Bigger.(Carly Fiorina)(Brief Article)
August 30, 2004... HP CEO Carly Fiorina has apparently got herself a big Itanium problem. According to a survey of 7,000 of the company's global customers, released by the HP user group Interex, only 50% of its HP-UX users plan to move to Itanium ever....

Get Off the Friggin' Phone & SELL Something.(Hewlett-Packard Co.)(Brief Article)
August 30, 2004... One observer claims HP is frozen internally in conference call hell and that's why it can't execute. He says the place has practically cornered the market in conference phones that its staff use to talk to one another, that it's got way...

McAfee To Buy Foundstone.(Brief Article)
August 30, 2004... McAfee is beefing up its intrusion prevention with the proposed acquisition of vulnerability management house Foundstone Inc for $86 million cash. Founded in 1999, the Mission Viejo, California Foundstone provides security widgetry that's...

EU Studies Microsoft-Time Warner Deal Hard.(Brief Article)
August 30, 2004... Out of fear of possible dominance, the European Union has opened a full-blown review of the Microsoft-Time Warner deal to make anti-piracy software together. The deal, in case you've forgotten, is their Contentguard acquisition from Xerox...

Mobile Data Market To Hit $189b in 2009.(Brief Article)
August 30, 2004... Anew study from Strategy Analytics estimates that the global mobile data market will grow from $61 billion this year to $189 billion in five years. Person-to-person messaging will make up about 48% of the total, including 26% from SMS text...

Dell Just Couldn't Help Itself.(Brief Article)
August 30, 2004... According to the story we heard retailed, Michael Dell was kicking himself about not getting into printers sooner. All he wanted to do was to gut HP's profit engine -- HP gets all or almost all of profits from its printer operation -- and would...