ePostal News articles from August 2008

ePostal News archives from August 2008

DocuSign Promises Completely Paperless Contracts.
August 4, 2008... DocuSign, the e-signature provider, has revved its eponymous widgetry, adding features that are supposed to help customers achieve the long-sought goal of replacing paper in all contract execution processes with a fully secure electronic...

TNT-FedEx Talks Come to Naught: WSJ.
August 4, 2008... The Wall Street Journal says those "preliminary" acquisition talks that the Financial Times said a few weeks TNT and FedEx were engaging in tanked. The Journal described them as "low-level" and indicated price was a problem. TNT's stock leapt...

Stamps.com Treads Water.
August 4, 2008... When it posted its Q2 results, Stamps.com proved to be exactly where it was in the second quarter last year, indicating that it hasn't figured out how to grow its PC Postage business although it might be credited with a certain amount of...

VeriFone Gets USPS Contract.(United States. Postal Service)(Brief article)
August 4, 2008... VeriFone Holdings Inc, the secure e-payment house, has gotten a multi-year contract valued at up to $10 million to provide the USPS with electronic payment solutions for use across the country. VeriFone will provide the Vx 570 countertop...

DHL Express Launches Global Online Tracking Tool.
August 4, 2008... DHL has launched Global ProView, a tool that enables customers of its Time Definite International (TDI) Express services to track all their shipments simultaneously with one online application. Global ProView is accessible from any point on the...

UPS Earnings Drop, Pulls in Guidance.
August 4, 2008... UPS, as expected, has gone down the same dusty road as FedEx. It reported a 21% drop in Q2 earnings to $873 million, 85 cents a share, and blames the economy and fuel costs. It also lowered its guidance for the year although it expects the...

Innovapost Extends its Microsoft Competency.
August 4, 2008... Innovapost, the IT joint venture between Canada Post and CGI, has extended its certified status in Microsoft's Partner Program to include a Mobility Solutions Competency, meaning it has a proven competency in developing and deploying Windows...

USPS Tests Hydrogen Fuel Vehicle.
August 4, 2008... The United States Postal Service, which runs the world's largest civilian fleet of vehicles, wants to be less dependent on petroleum and replace its 195,000 neighborhood delivery vehicles. It's testing a General Motors-built Chevrolet Equinox...

UPU Out for New Postal Payment Services Agreement.(Universal Postal Union)(Brief article)
August 4, 2008... The Universal Postal Union (UPU) is trying to get its members to adopt a new Postal Payment Services Agreement that reportedly comes with a multilateral framework to facilitate the exchange of money transfers between postal operators,...

IDTechEx Peddling RFID Study.
August 4, 2008... IDTechEx is peddling a $2,500 "RFID for Postal and Courier Services 2008-2018" report. It says the 10-year forecasts come with a full explanation of the technologies along with 40 new case studies of RFID in action in the postal and courier...

New Plan Reported for Israel Post Privatization.
August 4, 2008... It appears that Israel Post could be looking at partial privatization next year. News reports say the latest plan is to float 30% of the company in the third quarter of next year on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange or at least "after the future...

Microsoft Reorgs After Key Exec Bolts.
August 4, 2008... Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is now running the company's Windows, Windows Live and Internet properties after Kevin Johnson, the president of the company's Platforms and Services Division (PSD) and a key player in the failed Microsoft-Yahoo...

VMware To Cut its Hypervisor Price To Free.
August 4, 2008... Two weeks after its co-founder and CEO Diane Greene was abruptly dismissed, VMware - now run by one of Microsoft's old rulers, Paul Maritz - disclosed exactly how much under its promised 50% year-over-year growth 2008 is going to be. It's...

'OK, Boys, Here's the Plan': What Ballmer's Telling People.
August 4, 2008... With Microsoft mandarin Kevin Johnson bolting to Juniper, leaving Microsoft to lick its wounds over Yahoo and reorganize, CEO Steve Ballmer sent out an all-hands e-mail to Microsoft folk encapsulating the message he delivered to financial...

Yahoo Misses, Tokes Up, Says Everything's Fine.
August 4, 2008... A year into Jerry Yang's turnaround strategy - and 10 days before a potentially ear-boxing stockholders meeting - and Yahoo has produced second-quarter results that missed Wall Street's reduced expectations. And, as the AP observed, its market...

Clouds Have Their Blue Screen of Death Too.(Brief article)
August 4, 2008... One of the problems with clouds is that they have this tendency to rain as it did on Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) when it went down - and not for the first time - in both the US and Europe for something like eight hours - translating...

AMD Loses Share.
August 4, 2008... According to Mercury Research by way of Lehman Brothers AMD lost share in both desktops and notebooks in Q2 measured in both units and revenue. Intel was up two points to 87.5% in notebook units aided and abetted by AMD's slower-than-expected...

Microsoft Buy DATAllegro.
August 4, 2008... Microsoft is going into competition with Teradata and HP's little-heard-from Neoview unit by buying DATAllegro Inc, which does big-time data warehouse appliances, on undisclosed terms. It's supposed to extend the capabilities of Microsoft's...

SAP To Shut Down TomorrowNow.
August 4, 2008... SAP said it was going to close down its TomorrowNow (TM) operation, the reason Oracle is suing SAP, claiming TM hacked into its site and stole its proprietary support information. SAP bought the PeopleSoft/JD Edwards/Siebel service start-up in...

3PAR Puts its Snapshot Widgetry at the Service of VMware VDI.
August 4, 2008... 3PAR, the utility storage company, says it's got an integrated virtual desktop provisioning and management solution for the VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) that will also scale VDI storage. It's supposed to automatically provision...

Apple Blows Up after Blow-Out Quarter.
August 4, 2008... Apple got pared in after-hours trading, dropping 18 bucks, close to 11%, apparently because of the weak guidance it issued for the current quarter and because it declared the state of Steve Jobs' health off-limits on a day when the New York...

Nehalem Scheduled Unchanged.
August 4, 2008... DigiTimes' defect rate seems to be rising. It reported that Intel has moved up its Nehalem launch to September. It hasn't. Production is still set for Q4. Meanwhile, Intel has unveiled eight highly integrated, multifunction, energy-efficient,...

Lehman Raises its PC Estimates.
August 4, 2008... Based on Q2 results, the advent of low-end notebooks and the fact that the US market didn't turn into an oil slick, Lehman Brothers has raised its worldwide PC forecast. It expects 2008 to be up 15% from 11.5% (5% growth US, 15% Europe and 21%...

Zimbra Revs Desktop.
August 4, 2008... Zimbra, Yahoo's open source Microsoft-opposing e-mail and calendaring folks, bought last September for $350 million, have released rev 3 beta of their offline e-mail client, Zimbra Desktop, which competes with Outlook, Thunderbird and everybody...

Jobs Not Dying, Press Figures.(Brief article)
August 4, 2008... Apple telling the press that the state of its CEO's health is a "private matter" was like waving a red cape in front of a bull. Within hours Fortune and the New York Times were reporting that the 53-year-old cancer survivor probably wasn't...

Google Launches Knol.
August 4, 2008... Google has launched Knol, its monetized Wikipedia rival in which contributors will be identified and any copy changes have to be approved by the authors who'll get a piece of the AdSense take. There are supposed be multiple articles on the same...

How Did That Happen?
August 4, 2008... Com.score says Microsoft's share of US search rose in June and Google's didn't; Google's fell. The tracker gave Google 61.5%, of the market, down from 61.8% in May and said Microsoft did 9.2%, up from 8.5%. Both AOL and Ask were down.

Nettop: No Margin.
August 4, 2008... "It is a product that essentially has no margin." - Paul Moore, Fujitsu's senior director of mobile product management, on the so-called Nettop in the New York Times.

Apple's MobileMe Bombs.
August 4, 2008... Apple's first flirtation with the Cloud has turned stormy. The Wall Street Journal's great and powerful technology critic Walt Mossberg, a known Apple devotee, has panned its $99-a-year corporate-style synchronization service as unreliable....

Earth Class Mail To Deposit Checks.
August 11, 2008... Earth Class Mail Corp, the digital alternative to the old-fashioned mailman, says that its customers can now deposit the paper checks they get in their Earth Class Mail accounts directly into their bank accounts in a single step. Earth Class...

Deutsche Post Scrubs HP Outsourcing Deal.
August 11, 2008... Deutsche Post ain't going to outsource its IT to Hewlett-Packard like it planned, according to InformationWeek, which got a hold of an internal Deutsche Post e-mail saying that the deal was off. In signing a letter of intent in January, when...

Microsoft Creates EPCM Plug-in for UPU.
August 11, 2008... Microsoft has run up an Electronic Postal Certification Mark (EPCM) for the Universal Postal Union (UPU). Described as a plug-in application, the widgetry is supposed to let a user access a postal operator's electronic postmarking service...

Prime Suspect in Bioterrorist Anthrax Mailings Commits Suicide.
August 11, 2008... The apparent suicide of US government bio-defense researcher Bruce Ivins, 62, who was reportedly about to be charged with murder for the five random deaths caused by the unsolved anthrax attacks that occurred in 2001 shortly after the 9/11...

Indros Puts USPS Barcode Support in URL Solution.
August 11, 2008... Indros Group says it is now offering the creation, tracking and reporting of USPS Intelligent Mail barcodes as part of its Easy Personalized URLs cross-media platform. The integration will report mail-piece delivery along with web-response...

Countrywide Scandal Said To Touch US Postmaster General.
August 11, 2008... Quoting company documents, Fox News commentator Sean Hannity said that Postmaster General John Potter was one of the "Friends of Angelo" to get preferential treatment from Countrywide Financial, one of the companies at the center of the...

Deutsche Post Earnings Off 11%.(Financial report)
August 11, 2008... DHL America and a Postbank charge dragged down Deutsche Post's second-quarter earnings 11% to 254 million euros ($396 million, or 21 cents a share) on revenues up 5% to 16.2 billion euros ($25.2 billion). Its stock, off 36% this year, fell...

Pitney Earnings Down.
August 11, 2008... Pitney Bowes came in Monday with Q2 earnings of $128 million, or 61 cents a share, down year-over-year from $152 million, or 68 cents a share. Without the restructuring charges it said it would have earned 69 cents. Revenues for the June...

Alfresco Looks To Oust SharePoint.
August 11, 2008... Alfresco pounced on that SharePoint protocol that the European Commission forced Microsoft to disgorge and has turned up with what it claims is the first fully compatible open source alternative to Microsoft SharePoint, one of the...

Microsoft To Sic Red Dog on the Cloud.
August 11, 2008... One of Microsoft's confidants says that the Red Dog project that broke cover in a want ad a few months ago is indeed the Kiplingesque pet name for Microsoft's impending cloud infrastructure - well, at least part of it anyway. It was described...

No Fire in the Belly of Yahoo Stockholders.
August 11, 2008... Deprived of a proxy fight Yahoo stockholders basically reacted with a shrug Friday to the board that cost them billions by running off Microsoft and overwhelmingly returned the existing directors to office. CEO Jerry Yang got 85.4% of the vote,...

Microsoft Contemplates a Post-Windows World.
August 11, 2008... Starting with a clean piece of paper, Microsoft is having a go at building a non-Windows operating system. Code named Midori, it may never be released but if Midori isn't heir to Windows Microsoft better have something else like it up its...

Yahoo, HP & Intel Embark on Joint Cloud Research.
August 11, 2008... Yahoo, HP and Intel are going to do cloud research together using a global, multi-data center, open source Cloud Computing Test Bed bigger than anything put together for such a purpose before, they said. The whole testbed could potentially...

Oracle Amends Suit, Claims To Have SAP by the Short Hairs.
August 11, 2008... Oracle has amended its billion-dollar suit against SAP claiming to have found the smoking gun implicating SAP CEO Henning Kagermann and SAP's executive board in the wholesale theft and resale of Oracle's IP by SAP support subsidiary TomorrowNow...

Portugal To Resell 500k Intel Classmate Laptops.
August 11, 2008... Under what it's calling the Magellan Initiative, this school year Portugal is supposed to resell for some unknown price 500,000 low-cost Intel-based Classmate PCs to the country's grade school kids. It is Intel's biggest Classmate sale yet;...

IBM Buying Struggling ILOG.
August 11, 2008... Having cut a deal with ILOG's board, IBM is going to tender for the French company in both France and the US offering roughly $340 million cash (215 million euros), something like a 37% premium over ILOG's price right before they cut the deal,...

VMware Sets its Hypervisor Free.
August 11, 2008... Attempting to put space between itself and Microsoft - and as a talisman against a weakening economy - VMware has made good on its promise to cut the price of its standalone ESXi hypervisor to free. The ESXi 3.5 update 2 widgetry, which the...

VMware Launches Windows Scripting Environment.
August 11, 2008... VMware has released VMware Infrastructure (VI) Toolkit (for Windows), a free addition to its scripting toolkit portfolio, which is meant to help automate virtual datacenters. The toolkit is described an easy-to-use scripting interface for...

One of Google's Own Goes into Competition with It.(Brief article)
August 11, 2008... The two-year-old counter-Google search start-up, Cuil (say cool), Irish for knowledge and notable for its ex-Google founders, finally hit the radar screen and got a lot of ink because of its DNA, a lot of the comments cruelly negative. (Cuil...

YouTube Gets Sued Again.
August 11, 2008... Google and its little pal YouTube have attracted another lawsuit for copyright infringement. Rome-based Mediaset, controlled by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, is demanding 500 million euros ($779.3 million) in damages. Mediaset...

Microsoft's Appeasement Party Strikes Again.
August 11, 2008... Like Google and Yahoo, Microsoft is now suddenly a platinum sponsor of that open source touchstone, the Apache Software Foundation, and has pledged its $100,000 check. The move was announced at the Open Source Convention in a speech by...

Purple Flowers.
August 11, 2008... Following $32 million acquisition of Openwave's browser business a few weeks ago, Purple Labs is buying the mobile applications suite and software engineering team of Sagem Mobiles, a French maker of mobile phones branded by Sony Ericsson,...

Jobs Tells the Times the Cancer Hasn't Come Back.
August 11, 2008... Out of the blue Steve Jobs called up New York Times reporter Joe Nocera - who's been pestering Apple about the state of Steve's health - and told him - off the record - what's been ailing him. Jobs appears to have confirmed the Times and...

Mozy Claims 100% Growth in Six Month.
August 11, 2008... Mozy, EMC's online backup property, says it doubled the size of its enterprise and SMB customer base in the first half and now has more than 750,000 users and 20,000 business customers backing up 7.6 billion files to its 10-petabyte storage...

Sun Chases Cloud.(Brief article)
August 11, 2008... Sun is turning its Network.com utility computing operation into a separate cloud business under its chief sustainability officer Dave Douglas, reporting to CEO Jonathan Schwartz, according to The Register. Network.com, which sells access to...

TechCrunch Recants Digg Piece.
August 11, 2008... TechCrunch has taken back its story saying Google is going to buy Digg.com for $200 million. It claims something insurmountable came up during Google's due diligence

UPS Bids $15b for TNT, Paper Says.
August 18, 2008... UPS may walk through the door opened with TNT by US rival FedEX. Those merger talks between FedEx and TNT - described as "preliminary" by the Financial Times and "low level" by the Wall Street Journal - that collapsed a couple of weeks ago may...

USPS Goes with AspireHR & eQuest.
August 18, 2008... The United States Postal Service has picked AspireHR's TalentScout software and eQuest to update its-recruiting implementation. AspireHR, the largest SAP partner focused exclusively on HR, and eQuest, the job posting and Internet recruitment...

USPS Loses $1.1b; Frets Mail Volumes Lost Forever.
August 18, 2008... Blaming the US slowdown and escalating fuel prices, the US Postal Service ended its third fiscal quarter in June with a greater-than-expected net loss of $1.1 billion. It said mail volume dropped 5.5%, an accelerated pace. The agency, which...

Authentidate To Acquire Parascript.
August 18, 2008... Authentidate, the USPS' failed EPM contractor, is buying Parascript LLC, a privately held image analysis and pattern recognition ISV for up to $10 million in cash, a five-year 10% note in the amount of $20 million, which is subject to...

BCC Releases Mail Manager Full Service.(BCC Software Inc.)(Brief article)
August 18, 2008... BCC Software, the B|we Bell + Howell company, has created a new upper tier of its mailing software. Mail Manager Full Service is supposed to deliver a complete suite of mail-processing functionality in a single powerful package. BCC claims "the...

Goodmail To Support New Yahoo Domains.(Goodmail Systems)(Brief article)
August 18, 2008... Goodmail Systems, creator of CertifiedEmail, the trusted e-mail, is supporting Yahoo's new Webmail domains, Ymail and Rocketmail. So consumers who use a ymail or rocketmail address can get the additional layer of protection that users of Yahoo...

IBM & Linux Distros Try Ganging Up on the Microsoft Desktop.
August 18, 2008... IBM, Canonical, Novell, Red Hat and the distributions' hardware partners are ganging up on Microsoft, intending to push a Microsoft-free desktop alternative involving Linux, Lotus Notes and the freebie OpenOffice-based Lotus Symphony. They...

Dell's Cloud Trademark Stymied.
August 18, 2008... A person or persons unknown has upset Dell's plans to trademark the nebulous buzzword "Cloud Computing." The US Patent and Trademark Office suddenly yanked the so-called "notice of allowance" that gave Dell the mark but didn't register it....

AT&T Takes to the Cloud.
August 18, 2008... AT&T has broken into the cloud business with the "global launch" of what it calls AT&T Synaptic Hosting and describes as a next-generation utility computing service with managed networking, security and storage for businesses. It's talking...

Steve Jobs Eats Humble Pie.(Apple Inc's MobileMe)(Brief article)
August 18, 2008... In an internal e-mail leaked to Ars Technica, Apple CEO Steve Jobs admitted that MobileMe, Apple's panned flirtation with the cloud, was launched prematurely and was "not up to Apple's standards." Remember? Even the Apple-loving Walt Mossberg...

Intel Hikes Up Its Skirt; Flaunts Larrabee, the Next Great Thing.
August 18, 2008... Ahead of Siggraph this week Intel decided to lift its skirt and pass around the paper it'll read there describing Larrabee, its new hydra-headed x86 graphics accelerator architecture meant to take on Nvidia and AMD's graphics arm ATI in late...

SQL Server 2008 RTMs.
August 18, 2008... SQL Server 2008 has RTM'd. Microsoft says there were 450,000 downloads of the preview, 75 large-scale applications are already in production and more than 1,350 applications are being developed by ISVs. It will be offered in an Enterprise...

IBM Building its 8th & 9th Clouds.
August 18, 2008... IBM says that it is going to build a $360 million state-of-the-art commercial cloud on its campus at Research Triangle Park in North Carolina, intending that the thing be the first built with IBM's New Enterprise Data Center design principles...

It's Official. Icahn's on the Yahoo Board.
August 18, 2008... Microsoft hugger Carl Icahn is now officially on the Yahoo board. Under the deal that ended his proxy fight, two more directors from Icahn's original "oust-the-incumbents" proxy slate are supposed to be elected by mid-month. The list was...

Yahoo Stockholders Don't Like Jerry Yang THAT Much.
August 18, 2008... Turns out the vote that overwhelmingly returned Yahoo's board to office by a surprise three-to-one margin was seriously miscounted. The official tabulation claimed that CEO Jerry Yang got 85.4% of the vote (14.6% withheld) and Yahoo chairman...

Sun Eclipsed by Economy.
August 18, 2008... If Sun hadn't done that one-for-four reverse stock split in November and turned its $5 stock into a $20 stock, it would now be a $2 stock. Instead, it's a $9-$10 stock, down 50%. And things don't look like they're gonna get much better. So...

IBM Contributes Open-Source Code for Linux Supercomputers.
August 18, 2008... IBM has released its first certified package of open source software for supercomputers based on Linux. The IBM HPC Open Software Stack is supposed to make clusters more productive and easier to manage and HPC, which has jumped the...

Google Won't Call LiMo.(LiMo Foundation)(Brief article)
August 18, 2008... The LiMo Foundation has wracked up 11 more members, bringing its total to 50 companies. But Google has indicated that it feels no compunction to add Android to LiMo's successes, proclaiming "unification for the sake of unification is not the...

VMware Joins the Linux Foundation.
August 18, 2008... VMware, which seems to be as far from open source as you can get these days, has joined the Linux Foundation, promising to make more contributions to the Linux community. It's cultivating the Linux crowd as adoption of Linux expands as a...

Whither Fujitsu Siemens?(Fujitsu Siemens Computers)(Brief article)
August 18, 2008... Disappointed with its performance, Siemens wants out of its nine-year-old Fujitsu Siemens Computers joint venture, according to the Wall Street Journal, throwing the ball into Fujitsu's lap since Fujitsu's got dibs on buying out Siemens' 50%....

No EMC-Cisco Deal.
August 18, 2008... Cisco's not trying to buy EMC. When asked the other day in an interview on CNBC because of recent rumors Cisco CEO John Chamber replied, "We don't have any negotiations with any large companies at this time." He also pointed out that it was...

Zoho Claims One Million Users.(Brief article)
August 18, 2008... Zoho claims it's just gotten its millionth user three years after offering its first online application, Zoho Writer. Its portfolio has widened considerably since then. It says it took a year to hit 100,000 users, six months to get the second...

Red Hat Eyes Clouds.
August 18, 2008... "The clouds will all run Linux." - Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst in an interview with Cnet.

Google Tweaks Search Appliance.(Brief article)
August 18, 2008... Google has tweaked the architecture of its corporate, inside-the-firewall, Search Appliance so that one - not five - of the yellow boxes can index 10 million documents, up from oh, maybe, three million. It's also supposed to be two-five times...

Sun's xVM Server Inches To Release.
August 18, 2008... Sun says it's started the first part of its early access program for its xVM Server 1.0 virtualization widgetry, reportedly beginning with representatives of financial services, manufacturing, high tech and government. Sun says it'll be sending...

Moto Hires Phone Boss.
August 18, 2008... Motorola has hired Qualcomm COO Sanjay Jha as co-CEO to run its fading money-losing mobile devices unit, raising the question of whether it's bringing in the right skill set. The operation, which needs new phones, is expected to be spun off as...

RHEL 5.2 Certified.
August 18, 2008... Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 has gotten Department of Defense IPv6 Special Interoperability Certification from the Defense Information System Agency (DISA), giving it a government checkbox.

FTC Antitrust Chief Quits.
August 18, 2008... Jeffrey Schmidt, the head of the Federal Trade Commission antitrust unit that's investigating Intel, is leaving the agency for private practice ahead of any change in administration come November. He's been replaced for the moment by...

Microsoft Looses BI Guy.
August 18, 2008... Bill Baker, the general manager of Microsoft's SQL Server Business Intelligence unit, is bound for Visible Technologies, a social media monitoring ISV, as CTO, according to CRN.