ePostal News articles from August 2006

ePostal News archives from August 2006

Stamps.com revamps its software platform.
August 14, 2006... Stamps.com, the Internet postal pioneer, has revamped its software platform to give it a single web presentation and e-commerce system for all its products and services. The idea is supposed to give it more opportunities to upsell and...

Deutsche Post earnings fall like a lead balloon.
August 14, 2006... Deutsche Post profits plummeted 48% in Q2 while revenues jumped 32%. It cited the "high costs" of integrating its acquisition of the UK's Exel and Williams Lea Group, picked up for logistics and document management, respectively, as well...

USPS outsource its telecommunications management.
August 14, 2006... ProfitLine, a provider of telecom expense management (TEM), has won a contract from the United States Postal Service to manage its local voice telecom expenses for all locations and branches on an outsource basis. That's 37,000 locations. ...

Harte-Hanks buys Global Address.
August 14, 2006... Harte-Hanks Inc, the worldwide direct and targeted marketing company, has acquired Global Address, a UK-based company that provides global postal address data quality software and services incorporating standards for more than 230 nations and...

BBH upgrades transformer.(Bowe Bell & Howell Co.)(Brief article)
August 14, 2006... Bowe Bell + Howell has put out a new release of a flexible document enhancement tool that enables customers to take best advantage of the capabilities of their mailing equipment and software solutions. TransFormer 8.1, part of the Bowe One...

Returned Mail adds new verification process.
August 14, 2006... To improve on what the company describes as successful find rates for both consumer and business addresses, Returned Mail Solutions (RMS) has announced a new Verification process to the back-end of its current suite of Returned Mail and address...

IBM floats Opteron Armada.
August 14, 2006... IBM, which has been, um, sparing in its adoption of Opteron since it was the only big OEM to back the widget when it was introduced three years ago, has repented of its Sun- and HP-advantaging distance and its decision to sell Opteron boxes...

AOL bites the bullet, rejigs its business model.
August 14, 2006... AOL will be cutting 25% of its crew over the next six months, another 5,000 people, as it restructures to chase advertising rather than subscriptions, the same ad dollars Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are chasing. The layoffs--and AOL didn't...

Group of 10 drafts SML spec to address tower-of-Babel problem.
August 14, 2006... The usual suspects, headed by Microsoft and IBM and including Sun, Intel, HP, EMC, Dell, Cisco, BEA and BMC, have published a draft specification of what they call Service Modeling Language (SML) that's supposed to make the heterogeneous...

Windows guard to change.
August 14, 2006... Brian Valentine, senior VP of the Windows Core Operating System Division (COSD), the guy brought in, in the midst of the Vista fiasco, to kick butt and take names, the guy nominally in line to succeed retiring Windows chief Jim Allchin, is...

Microsoft lights candles to the patron Saint of documentation, praying for deliverance.
August 14, 2006... Microsoft has submitted what should be the last of the protocol documentation it owes the European Commission and now it's waiting to find out if the agency thinks it's good enough for Microsoft to escape further fines. The EC socked...

Real cuts Firefox deal; extends Google alliance.
August 14, 2006... Under a multi-year deal that presumes some undisclosed amount of money changing hands, RealNetworks is going to start offering the Firefox browser with RealPlayer, its Rhapsody music service and RealArcade game. At the same time and...

The poor, it appears, are ungrateful.(One Laptop Per Child proposal)(Brief article)
August 14, 2006... According to press reports, India has told MIT's Nicholas Negroponte and his Linux/AMD-based One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) proposal--which needs government orders of five-10 million machines to get into production--to take a hike, India's...

Dump Rollins campaign starts.
August 14, 2006... Without naming names, JP Morgan Securities has suggested in a research note that Dell consider "substantial changes in its business leadership structure," code words for dumping CEO Kevin Rollins and bringing back Michael Dell.

Vista outlook looking dim.
August 14, 2006... According to reports from the beta 2 front, Vista is still bug-ridden, unstable and a memory hog three months before Microsoft is supposed to start packing it up to send to its business customers. Since it's already years late--and since...

Ex-Brocade CEO posts $2m stay-out-of-jail bond.(Greg Reyes)(Brief article)
August 14, 2006... Greg Reyes, the ex-CEO of Brocade, posted a $2 million bond and turned his passport over to his lawyers after being hauled into court on criminal charges of securities fraud brought by the US Attorney in connection with stock option backdating....

Microsoft claims Gates interview phoney.
August 14, 2006... The New York Times had its Jayson Blair and now Bill Gates apparently his Bjoern Benkow. Benkow is a Norwegian journalist, who--according to Microsoft--fabricated an interview with Gates that ran in two Scandinavian publications under the...

Apple backdating woes worsen.
August 14, 2006... Apple has figured out that more of its tit is caught in this backdating wringer than originally thought but it doesn't know how bad or how far back it's going to have to restate. It looks like the last nine years.

How many torrents in an avalanche?
August 14, 2006... Microsoft supposedly has a hyper-BitTorrent-like research project going on called Avalanche that it could presumably use for downloading operating systems and MSDN releases.

British Post Office may become Internet provider.
August 21, 2006... The British press has been atwitter with the news that the Post Office may get into the cutthroat UK broadband Internet fray that has been so vicious other players have been forced out. The Royal Mail already offers HomePhone, a Cable &...

Parascript & Mitek to merge: form world's biggest image analytics and intelligent recognition ISV.
August 21, 2006... Privately held Parascript LLC, whose intelligent recognition widgetry is used by the United State Postal Service to read handwriting, is merging with California rival Mitek Systems Inc in a deal valued at about $145 million in cash and stock....

Canada Post creates Light Packet for eBay shippers.
August 21, 2006... Canada Post is going to introduce a new international shipping service called Light Packet that's designed to suit the needs of Canadian eBay members. The service is described as an economical solution that facilitates the movement of...

Israel Post starts modernizing, places first order with Siemens.(Israel Postal Company)(Siemens Industrial Solutions and Services Group)
August 21, 2006... The Israel Postal Company has placed an order for two custom mail-sorting systems with Siemens Industrial Solutions and Services Group (I&S). The solution combines pre-processing of the incoming mail with reading and encoding of the...

Postal inspectors seek solution.
August 21, 2006... The USPS' Inspection Service is looking for a commercially available advanced search and analysis tool for data and text. It has to be able to parse and analyze criminal information and be Microsoft .NET-compatible as well as a thin client...

Fedex wannabe to use Internap Widgetry.
August 21, 2006... Internap Network Services Corporation, a provider of performance-based routing solutions over the Internet, has been selected as exclusive provider of Internet connectivity services to RedRoller.com, the free new Web-based shipping solution...

Apple NDAs Leopard expecting developers to keep quiet.
August 21, 2006... Apple has pushed out a preview version of its sixth-generation operating system, Leopard, otherwise known as Mac OS X 10.5, to developers under non-disclosure expecting them to keep mum about a number of tantalizing new features that Apple...

VMware stakes out Apple slice.
August 21, 2006... VMware showed off some new prototype widgetry that will let Intel-based Macs run x86 operating systems other than Apple's precious Mac OS X, stuff like Windows, Linux, NetWare and Solaris in virtual machines at the same time the box is running...

Intel dumps its $780m dialogic acquisition.
August 21, 2006... Intel is selling a telephony unit, its media and signaling operation, to privately held Eicon Networks Corporation for an undisclosed amount of money. Intel will shed 600 people in the process. In hand-to-hand combat with AMD, Intel has...

Intel's likely response to AMD-ATI.
August 21, 2006... Graphics chip maven Jon Peddie figures Intel is going to build a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) in response to the AMD-ATI tie-up, which he says threatens Intel across a broader front than anything AMD has ever be able to manage before. ...

IBM splurges on FileNet in bid for control of content management market.
August 21, 2006... IBM said it's buying FileNet, the business process and content management software house that competes with EMC's Documentum, for $1.6 billion cash, making it one of IBM's most expensive acquisitions ever. At $35 a share there's no real...

Gartner reiterates Vista forecast.(Brief article)
August 21, 2006... Gartner is sticking to its prophecy that Vista won't launch until the second quarter of next year despite improvements in interim builds. In fact it says build 5472 was "a pretty solid platform, and one that can be used for day-to-day...

AMD cracks another Intel icon.
August 21, 2006... AMD has cracked Lenovo's previously Intel-only enterprise-directed ThinkCenter PCs, but the sacred ThinkPad notebook that Lenovo inherited from IBM, responsible for 52% of Lenovo's sales in Q2, is still off-limits to the interloper--at least...

Novell fiddles with branding.
August 21, 2006... Novell has fiddled with its branding. It has changed the name of SUSE Linux, its free community distribution, to openSUSE, the name of its open source project. SUSE Linux Enterprise will remain SUSE Linux Enterprise. openSUSE is not meant for...

Comverse CEO on the Lam.
August 21, 2006... The former CEO of Comverse Technology Inc Kobi Alexander is on the lam with a warrant sworn out for his arrest after he failed to show up in court to be charged with criminal fraud in connection with a widening government backdating probe that...

Sprint, Intel et al & their $3b WiMax network.
August 21, 2006... Sprint Nextel is going to spend $3 billion between now and the end of 2008 building out a high-speed 4G WiMax-based wireless data network and it's signed up Intel, Motorola and Samsung to help it. It should have pilots running in test markets...

Dell still hasn't scrapped bottom.
August 21, 2006... Banc of America figures Dell hasn't bottomed out yet because it isn't strong enough in the third world and is overexposed in corporate accounts in the US, Europe and Japan, a problem that flirting with AMD won't help.

Linux cannibalizing its mother.
August 21, 2006... Unix is losing share to Linux in the US government enterprise server market, one of Unix' original strongholds, according to an IDC report that says Linux use on government enterprise servers--in other words non-scientific systems--will rise...