ePostal News articles from August 2005

ePostal News archives from August 2005

AddressWare Web Service goes mass market.
August 1, 2005... Britain's Postcode Anywhere says its .NET-based AddressWare software takes the pain out of capturing and verifying addresses by recognizing postcodes as users type and entering the accurate postal address where it belongs--be it an order entry,...

Stamps.com sells 1.4m PhotoStamps in six weeks.(Brief Article)
August 1, 2005... Stamps.com did $1.2 million worth of business in PhotoStamps during the first six weeks of the USPS-approved phase-two market test of custom PC postage that kicked off midway through the last quarter. That revenue number translates into roughly...

Pitney supplying Zazzle software.(Brief Article)
August 1, 2005... Under its alliance with Zazzle, the sexy new custom PC postage entrant, Pitney Bowes says it's providing the software that manages the postage transaction between the customer and the United States Postal Service. Consumers can go to...

Group 1 previews point-level geocoding system.(Brief Article)
August 1, 2005... Group 1 Software Inc, a Pitney Bowes company, has introduced the geocoding industry's first point-level solution, a thing called GeoStan Point-Level Option that incorporates point data that locates addresses at the center of an actual building...

New Dutch e-bill system reportedly in the works.(TPG Post)(Brief Article)
August 1, 2005... A published report says the Dutch Postbank, Rabobank, ABN Amro and ING Bank are supposed to launch an electronic invoicing and payment system called NotaBox in the first half of next year after a pilot this summer. The widgetry is...

DHL & eBay cozy up.(alliances and partnerships)(Brief Article)
August 1, 2005... eBay sellers can now access DHL's ePaket via eBay to get an item picked up and shipped. It used to be that this could only be done via the www.efiliale.de online ordering platform. Now after an article has been auctioned off on eBay, the...

USPS & eBay launch national tour to support small business, entrepreneurs.(Brief Article)
August 1, 2005... More than 724,000 Americans depend on eBay for their primary or secondary source of income and another 1.5 million individuals say they supplement their income by selling on eBay, according to a study commissioned by eBay and done in July by...

Bank of Ireland, UK Post Office tighten pact.(Brief Article)
August 1, 2005... The Bank of Ireland has a new deal with the UK Post Office to put over 1,000 ATMs in the UK Post Office branch network. The Bank of Ireland has doubled its own ATM network in the last three years and already has an ATM presence in Northern...

HomePhone hits 100,000 customers.(Brief Article)
August 1, 2005... Britain's Post Office says its HomePhone scheme is on target to win 5% of the residential telephone market by 2008. One hundred thousand customers signed up for HomePhone in the first five months since it was launched in January, making it one...

USPS & Pac rim posts to provide guaranteed mail service.(US Postal Service)(Brief Article)
August 1, 2005... The US Postal Service has joined with the postal administrations in Australia, China, Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea to offer an enhanced expedited shipping service to these destinations. They are supposed to provide day-certain guaranteed...

UPS to buy Lynx.(United Parcel Service of America Inc.)(Brief Article)
August 1, 2005... UPS is going to buy Lynx Express Ltd for $96.5 million in cash (55.5 million quid) to strengthen its package delivery capabilities in the UK. Lynx Express is one of Britain's largest independent parcel carriers and majority owned by the...

E-mail watch.
August 1, 2005... The US Congress got 200 million e-mails and letters in 2004, four times the 50 million it got in 1995. During those 10 years, conventional mail dropped to about 18 million letters. Seventeen percent of House offices and 38% of Senate offices...

Pitney Q2 revenues up 13%.(Pitney Bowes Inc.)
August 1, 2005... Pitney Bowes reported second-quarter revenues up 13% to $1.36 billion, earning $139 million or 60 cents a share, up two cents a share year-over-year. But for $17 million, or seven cents a share, in restructuring charges, earnings would have...

Oracle prices multi-cores.(counting and pricing processors)(Brief Article)
August 1, 2005... Oracle has made what may or may not be a grudging move on the multi-core pricing front. At least it's stated a position. It says it still recognizes each core as a separate processor, but claims it's changed how it defines a processor to...

IBM loses Global Services chief.(appointments)(Brief Article)
August 1, 2005... IBM has lost John Joyce, the head of IBM Global Services, described as the most powerful man at IBM next to CEO Sam Palmisano. It lost him to private equity house Silver Lake Partners, the place where Ed Zander turned up between Sun and...

HP labs among the first hit.(downsizing)(Brief Article)
August 1, 2005... HP R&D isn't getting out of the latest company bloodletting unscathed, though it was supposed to be a relatively protected enclave. And the reorg apparently means HP Labs is going to have to get more practical. According to the...

Microsoft buys FrontBridge.(FrontBridge Technologies Inc.)
August 1, 2005... Microsoft is buying privately owned FrontBridge Technologies Inc on undisclosed terms for its secure corporate e-mail and messaging managed service. A published report quoting Gartner suggests Microsoft is paying $150 million-$180 million....

Microsoft licenses Finjan patents.(Microsoft Corp. acquires minority stakes in Finjan Software Inc.)(Brief Article)
August 1, 2005... On the same day that it scooped up corporate e-mail nanny FrontBridge Technologies, Microsoft also bought a minority piece of Finjan Software Inc as well as a non-exclusive license to some of Finjan's eight security patents. Financial details...

Mistress of DB2 to leave IBM.(IBM Software Group's Janet Perna retires)(Brief Article)
August 1, 2005... Oracle must be tickled pink. That black and blue mark that IBM has tattooed on its rump over the years might finally have a chance to heal. Janet Perna, general manager of IBM's Information Management Group and mistress of DB2, a pretty...

Microsoft sues Google for poaching.(Brief Article)
August 1, 2005... Shortly after noon in New York the other day Google announced that it had hired Dr Kai-Fu Lee, the head of Microsoft's search development and responsible for Microsoft's desktop search, to be president of a new R&D center it's going to put in...

AMD exacts ounce of flesh from Intel.(Intel Corp.'s sales fells short of expectations)
August 1, 2005... AMD must have tied one on the other night. Intel sold a record number of chips in Q2, but its gross margin came up short of guidance at 56.4% and it cited the pricing pressure that AMD exerted on its server ASPs as part of the reason. ...

IBM buys PureEdge.(PureEdge Solutions Inc.)
August 1, 2005... IBM is buying PureEdge Solutions Inc, the privately held British Columbia company that develops XML-based electronic forms and an IBM business partner, on undisclosed terms that are unlikely to have been very expensive. It's going to...

Open source takes on BI.(JasperSoft Corp. receives funding from Partech International, business intelligence)
August 1, 2005... JasperSoft Corporation, the outfit now commercializing the JasperReports open source reporting widgetry, has gotten an $8 million C round led by Partech International, an early investor in Business Objects, which bought Crystal Reports a while...

Egypt Posts rolls the dice on gaming joint venture.(Intralot)(Brief Article)
August 8, 2005... Intralot, the publicly held Greek gaming technology multinational, has signed a joint venture deal with Egypt Posts to develop and manage a national lottery and gaming services network. The deal calls for an initial investment of 10 million...

Endicia integrates Internet postage with fulfillment.(Brief Article)
August 8, 2005... California-based Endicia claims it's the first Internet postage player to offer the widgetry with integrated fulfillment. Its new product, Endicia Professional, lets fulfillment operations process orders directly from their database and...

DHL to build new system for new Sun business.
August 8, 2005... Sun Microsystems has picked DHL as its exclusive aftermarket service parts global logistics provider. Sun previously relied on nearly 25 different third-party providers to serve its global customer base. DHL Solutions, the global...

South African Post goes with Escher counter automation system.(Brief Article)
August 8, 2005... The South African Post Office (SAPO) has picked Escher Group's WebRiposte counter system to automate its post office counter network. The win gives Escher a customer base of 24 countries that have implemented its Riposte family of products...

UPS Israeli arm gets e-signature widgetry.(UPS Israel)(Brief Article)
August 8, 2005... OPSI, a UPS service contractor in Israel, has gone with CoSign, the Algorithmic Research (ARX) electronic-signature solution, so it can migrate from paper-based invoices to electronic invoicing. UPS Israel's customers can now continue to...

Arab Posts reportedly back e-fund transfer network.(International Financial System)(Brief Article)
August 8, 2005... Apparently the rest of the Arab world has decided that it wants in on the International Financial System (IFS) run by the Universal Postal Union (UPU). Following an international conference of senior postal officials last month, the...

PAN awarded USPS employment testing contract.(Performance Assessment Network Inc)(Brief Article)
August 8, 2005... The USPS has awarded Performance Assessment Network Inc (PAN), an Indiana-based provider of Internet-based testing and assessment solutions, a contract to provide technology and expert consulting services for the development and administration...

HomePhone cuts prices again.(Brief Article)
August 8, 2005... Britain's Post Office, in hand-to-hand combat with British Telecom, has cut the price of its Homephone service, claiming the lowest line rental price on the market. It says its customers can now benefit from cheaper calls and lower line...

Long Horn hits first beta.
August 8, 2005... Microsoft, as you may have heard, released the first Long Horn beta, a week ahead of the schedule it gave just the week before when it named the Long Horn client "Windows Vista." It's the only early thing that's ever happened to the...

Microsoft to segment more.(Brief Article)
August 8, 2005... Microsoft is going to segment Windows and Office to tickle growth. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told the company's annual meeting with financial analysts that the company would add high-end versions of the products, a picture painted to...

Firefox: 75m and counting.(Brief Article)
August 8, 2005... Microsoft may be starting to find the Firefox son-of-Netscape alternate web browser downright pesky. The Mozilla Foundation recorded the 75 millionth Firefox download last week. That's an additional 25 million downloads in less than...

Corel chases outlook.(Corel Corp)
August 8, 2005... Corel is going to try to take on Microsoft's desktop e-mail program Outlook by unbundling a standalone copy MAIL from its WordPerfect office suite, aiming it at the home and small business market. It's the first competitive move Corel has...

Starter Edition count.(product statistics)(Brief Article)
August 8, 2005... Microsoft senior vice president, Windows Client unit Will Poole told financial analysts that the company has sold 100,000 copies of its low-cost Linux-and-piracy defense, the Windows XP Starter Edition. The disclosure is the first...

Cisco gags Black Hat speaker.(Brief Article)
August 8, 2005... Cisco went to federal court for a restraining order after a presentation at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas showed how hackers could bring the Internet down by commandeering Cisco routers by exploiting a known, some say repaired,...

CA buys Qurb.(Computer Associates International Inc.)(Qurb Inc)(Brief Article)
August 8, 2005... Computer Associates has acquired three-year-old Qurb Inc, the privately held e-mail security outfit, for an undisclosed amount of cash. CA has licensed Qurb technology for its eTrust consumer line since last year. It will continue to...

Microsoft wins first round in Google poaching suit.
August 8, 2005... Microsoft defector and former Bill Gates confidant Kao-Fu Lee, whose head is supposed to be full of Microsoft's "most sensitive technical and strategic" secrets, can't continue to work for Google, at least not for the time being and at least...

SpikeSource branches out into made-to-order open source stacks.(Brief Article)
August 8, 2005... SpikeSource, the Kim Polese-Kleiner Perkins open source start-up testing and certifying LAMP stacks, is branching out into free fully configured made-to-order stacks. Developers will be able to configure a stack from a virtual Chinese menu...

IBM starts Blade.org.(Brief Article)
August 8, 2005... IBM is starting a new Blade.org "community" in the name of interoperability and concocting new blade technology on behalf of its BladeCenter. Besides IBM there are eight founding member including NetApp, Brocade, Cisco, Citrix, Intel,...

Ariel Sharon sticks his foot in Intel's mouth.
August 8, 2005... Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon beat any Intel announcement to the punch when he claimed that Intel would be putting another Pentium plant in Kiryat Gat in southern Israel. Intel has yet to confirm the news and has only claimed that it...

Good Lord, Sun made money!(Sun Microsystems Inc.)(Brief Article)
August 8, 2005... Sun beat Wall Street expectations and, thanks to a $190 million tax benefit, posted earnings of $121 million, or four cents a share, on fourth-quarter revenues down 4.3% to $2.975 billion. Without the myriad charges it took, it would have made...

Siebel continues to twist in the wind.(Siebel Systems Inc.)(Brief Article)
August 8, 2005... Siebel, which is trying to cut costs and grow at the same time--First Boston compares it to being between a rock and hard place--lost $50 million in Q2 thanks to a $74 million restructuring charge. Without it, it would have broken even....

CA to lay off more people.(Computer Associates International Inc.)
August 8, 2005... Battling its way back from an accounting scandal, Computer Associates is going to can another 5% of workforce, roughly 800 people, to save $75 million because new business is down, although profits doubled in its fiscal first quarter on...

Strategy? What strategy?(opinion)(Brief Article)
August 8, 2005... George Colony, the president of Forrester Research, emerged from an interview with HP CEO Mark Hurd to tell the New York Times that Hurd doesn't have a strategy to deal with HP, explaining that Hurd hasn't been there long enough to formulate...

AMD at 11% of the server market?(Advanced Micro Devices Inc.)(Brief Article)
August 8, 2005... Mercury Research, which counts industry standard chips, claims AMD's server market share went from 7.4% in Q1 to 11.2% in Q2, which, if true, goes a way to explaining how the upstart had a negative influence on Intel's ASPs last quarter as...

CA housecleaning reaches a lump in the rug.(Computer Associates International Inc.)(Brief Article)
August 8, 2005... Computer Associates' co-founder Russell Artzt, who shared that controversial billion-bonus with Charles Wang and Sanjay Kumar years ago, an event that slipped a banana peel under the company's foot, won't stand for re-election to the CA board...

HP user group dead.(Hewlett-Packard Co.)(Brief Article)
August 8, 2005... As HP struggles with its future, the 31-year-old HP user group Interex has thrown in the towel. It has disbanded and taken its HP World expo with it. Its web site says folding was "financially necessary" and "unavoidable." The new...

Notorious spammer found beaten to death.
August 8, 2005... Charles Bronson is apparently alive and well and living in the old Soviet Union. Russia's infamous spammer Vardan Kushnir was found bludgeoned to death in his Moscow apartment. It is unclear whether his murder has anything to do with his...

GM goes with Java ES.(General Motors Corp)(Java Enterprise System )(Brief Article)
August 8, 2005... During its earnings call Tuesday, Sun said General Motors is going to use the Java Enterprise System (Java ES) as an integrated software environment for its global IT infrastructure. The contract, whose value wasn't disclosed but could be...

Microsoft nails 230k UK desktops.(Department for Work and Pensions)
August 8, 2005... Linux flirtations notwithstanding and any discounts unspoken, Microsoft has nailed down 230,000 UK government desktops with Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs (HMRC) and the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). The three-year enterprise...

Intel jiggles platform branding.
August 8, 2005... Intel is changing the naming conventions used for its server and workstation platforms in anticipation of the dual-core Xeons and Itaniums that are expected to become standard Intel fare. The move is aimed at getting Intel out from under...

NZ Post sells off its ticket arm.(New Zealand, Red Ticket)
August 15, 2005... The New Zealand Post is selling off the brand and some of the assets of its three-year-old Red Ticket ticket-selling operation to Ticketmaster, the big international ticketing company newly arrived on New Zealand's shores. The acquisition...

Japanese government teeters over privatizing the post.(Brief Article)
August 15, 2005... The government of Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi could fall because of its plan to privatize the country's postal service and create the world's largest bank. On Monday the upper house of the Japanese parliament, including...

e-Boks gets government's pay slips business.(electronic mailbox)(Brief Article)
August 15, 2005... Starting this November Denmark's 165,000 state employees will be getting their pay slips in e-Boks, Post Danmark's electronic mailbox, under an agreement between the post and the Danish Agency for Governmental Management under the Ministry of...

TeleYemen, Post Office cut deal.(Brief Article)
August 15, 2005... Subscribers will be able to pay their TeleYemen bills via the Post Office and the Internet using the post's e-rial system under a scheme just launched with the Yemeni telecommunications company. TeleYemen CEO Jan-Michel Latute said...

Stamps.com waives handling charges on PhotoStamps.(Brief Article)
August 15, 2005... To tickle sales of its resurrected customized Internet postage stamps, Stamps.com is waiving its normal handling charges through August 31 for first-time customers and customers who haven't placed an order since last September. The...

Esker on demand reportedly in demand.(Esker Software opens new mail house)(Brief Article)
August 15, 2005... Esker Software, which sells intelligently automated document delivery solutions and services, says it's opened a new mail house at its US headquarters in response to a spike in the use of its Esker on Demand service. The online document...

Royal Mail reportedly plans 30,000 more job cuts.(Brief Article)
August 15, 2005... Britain's Royal Mail has sent a "secret" plan along to Postcomm, the mail regulator, saying it want to cut at least 30,000 full-time employees by 2010/11 and targeting incompetent managers, according to the Daily Telegraph. The BBC said...

Bowe Bell + Howell upgrades JETS.(Brief Article)
August 15, 2005... Bowe Bell + Howell has revved its JETS enterprise management software. The widgetry, now at version 3.1, adds customer-requested enhanced reporting and 3D floor-modeling capabilities. In a print/mail environment, enterprise management software...

Deutsche Post extends Escher contract.(Deutsche Post World Net, Escher Group)(Brief Article)
August 15, 2005... Deutsche Post World Net has extended its current counter automation contract with the Escher Group through 2010. The extension includes a technology upgrade as well as maintenance and support services. No value was disclosed. Deutsche Post...

RFID purveyor now at $200m in venture capital.(Alien Technology)(Brief Article)
August 15, 2005... Alien Technology, a California start-up specializing in the newfangled RFID widgetry that puts radio frequency identification tags on millions of consumer goods and anything people are interested in monitoring, has raised another $66 million,...

UPS polishes trade direct.(United Parcel Service of America Inc.)(Brief Article)
August 15, 2005... UPS says it's significantly improved its UPS Trade Direct service, which handles the cross-border movement of freight and packages and avoids warehousing. Customers can now use a common computer application to prepare and process freight and...

First Data buys APSS.(Austrian Payment Systems Services GmbH)
August 15, 2005... First Data Corporation, the e-commerce and payment services consolidator, is buying Austrian Payment Systems Services GmbH (APSS), a processor of cashless card-based payment transactions. Financial terms were not disclosed. APSS provides...

Amazon's shipping costs rise.(Brief Article)
August 15, 2005... Amazon spent $103 million on free shipping to customers in the first six months of this year, up from $77 million in the first half of 2004. Since February the company has been offering a program called Amazon Prime that lets people pay...

Mozilla dons a suit, dances with the devil.(Mozilla Foundation forms Mozilla Corporation)
August 15, 2005... The Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit open source descendent of Netscape, opened a new front in the decade-old browser wars when it announced that it had set up a for-profit subsidiary called Mozilla Corporation. Ah, to think how history...

Ballmer hires himself a COO.(Kevin Turner appointed)(Brief Article)
August 15, 2005... Microsoft has hired Kevin Turner, the president and chief executive officer of the $37 billion-a-year Sam's Club, the Wal-Mart warehouse club operation, as its COO. Microsoft hasn't had a COO since April of 2002 when Ballmer abruptly parted...

In a little different deal, Oracle buys majority interest in i-flex.(I-Flex Solutions Ltd.)
August 15, 2005... Well, the predictions were right. In the chess game Oracle is playing with SAP, it's just removed another pawn from the board. Continuing its buying spree, Oracle is buying a majority interest in publicly held i-flex solutions, India's...

IBM buys DWL.(Brief Article)
August 15, 2005... IBM is buying DWL, a privately held customer data management software house, on undisclosed terms for its Information Management unit and its on-demand interests. DWL's Java-cum-SOA-based data integration middleware pull together data from...

HCL to make Starter Edition PCs.(HCL Infosystems Ltd.)(Brief Article)
August 15, 2005... We found one of those legendary bundled-only Windows Starter Edition machines, the thing Microsoft came up with for a third world rife with piracy and Linux. HCL Infosystems, part of the $2.2 billion-a-year HCL Enterprise, says it's going...

The de-Carly-fication of HP continues.(Hewlett-Packard Co.)(Brief Article)
August 15, 2005... The latest Carly innovation to bite the dust at HP is her famous deal to resell the Apple iPod, according to the Wall Street Journal. The company's new administration seems to be working backwards and undoing her most recent novelties first...

NCR replaces Hurd.(Mark Hurd resigns, Bill Nuti appointed)(Brief Article)
August 15, 2005... NCR has poached Symbol Technologies CEO Bill Nuti, an ex-Cisco guy, to replace its gone-to-HP CEO Mark Hurd, effective August 8. Nuti's departure from Symbol, a neighbor of Computer Associates, stands in stark contrast to his predecessor...

Novell to cut EMEA jobs.(Brief Article)
August 15, 2005... Novell told the SEC that it's going to restructure its EMEA operation, reducing its staff by 120-150 people by the end of October "to improve its profitability and operating efficiency." The move is expected to cost $10 million-$12 million,...

Linux trades old critical defects for new, reportedly less critical ones.(Brief Article)
August 15, 2005... Coverity, the source code analysis start-up that analyzed the Linux kernel 2.6.9, the version used in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0, six months ago and found six potentially critical defects in the core filesystem and networking code, says that...

Carnegie Mellon proposes Open Source rating system.(Center for Open Source Investigation)(Brief Article)
August 15, 2005... There are over 100,000 open source projects listed on SourceForge, CodeHaus, Tigris, Freshmeat, Java.net and Open Symphony. There are 375 content management apps alone. Some widely adopted projects have become high-quality software...

Russians offer Linux protection.(Kaspersky Lab Ltd. introduces new software)
August 15, 2005... Kaspersky Lab, the Russian security house that opened a Boston office in February, is pushing its Linux anti-virus widgetry into the American market, having cut its teeth in Europe where Linux enterprise adoption is ahead of the US. The...

Novell to support JBoss Middleware platform.(contracts)(Brief Article)
August 15, 2005... Novell has become the first and only Linux infrastructure vendor to offer full enterprise-level support for JBoss Enterprise Middleware System (JEMS), giving customers a single point of contact. Under the agreement, Novell is offering 24x7...

Second service pack for SuSE out.(SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9)(Brief Article)
August 15, 2005... Novell has released a second service pack (SP2) for SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 that it says includes numerous security improvements, maintenance enhancements and updates for the most popular open source projects in the distribution. SP2...

Novell claims lead in China.(Novell Inc.)(Brief Article)
August 15, 2005... Quoting an IDC study called "China Linux Market Analysis, 1H2005," Novell claims to have had the lion's share of the Chinese Linux server market in the first half of this year. IDC figures Novell had 32.9% of the revenue and 30% of the...

Vista denounced.(Brief Article)
August 15, 2005... Dear, dear, dear. The VistA Software Alliance and WorldVista, non-profit groups that promote and assist healthcare organizations with the Veterans Administration's VistA software, have literally "denounced" Microsoft for officially calling Long...

What's in your wallet?(Document Security Systems Inc)(Brief Article)
August 15, 2005... Document Security Systems Inc, a Rochester, New York anti-counterfeiting technologist, filed suit in Luxembourg Monday claiming that all of the 30 billion euro notes in circulation infringe a patent that the European Patent Office issued in...

Death on account of sex.(Brief Article)
August 15, 2005... Russian spam master Vardan Kushnir wasn't bludgeoned to death a week ago Sunday because of his Internet antics. According to the Russian newspaper Kommersant he took three women he met in a nightclub home, they drugged him and were robbing him...

Australia post moves into US market: new acquisition to push its hybrid mail scheme.(PrintSoft Americas Inc.)
August 22, 2005... Australia Post has disclosed that on July 1 it acquired PrintSoft Products, a Melbourne-based hybrid mail company with global operations including a US unit called PrintSoft Americas Inc. Financial terms were not released. The post's...