ePostal News articles from December 2005

ePostal News archives from December 2005

EFunds' deal with USPS widens.
December 5, 2005... e Funds Corporation will be providing payment processing switching services, debit gateway processing and back-office solutions to the United States Postal Service. This new deal follows a software agreement signed in 2004 and involves new...

UPS survey finds shipping critical to online buying.
December 5, 2005... Internet shoppers say the successful delivery of goods purchased online is critical to their overall satisfaction and loyalty to online retailers, according to a new survey commissioned by UPS. The survey, done for UPS by Synovate, found...

RFID watch.
December 5, 2005... In the new report called "RFID for the Postal and Courier Service," Research and Markets estimates that the global market for RFID systems, including tags, will be $3 billion in 2016. It says it could be much bigger if current efforts to...

Zazzle ready for rate hike.(Brief article)
December 5, 2005... Zazzle, the ePostage newcomer, says it's ready for the USPS rate hike that the UPS board of governors decided will take effect on January 8--not the widely expected date of January 15. It claims it's the first licensed vendor of Customized...

Russian Post goes with symbol digital scanners.
December 5, 2005... Long Island-based Symbol Technologies Inc has announced that the Russian Post has picked its DS6608 two-dimensional (2D) bar code digital scanner as part of its point-of-sale terminal upgrade project. The value of the deal was not...

USPS & UPS expand their services on eBay.
December 5, 2005... USPS international shipping labels can now be printed off of eBay's web site. According to the VP of the Postal Service's Product Development Group, Nick Barranca, the post office offers some of the most economical rates available on eBay,...

Europeans expected spend more online this Xmas.
December 5, 2005... According to a survey by TradeDoubler, a European provider of online marketing and sales solutions, Europeans plan to do almost 20% more of their shopping online this Christmas compared to last year. The increase is attributed mainly to...

Christmas mail projected to hit record levels in Sweden.
December 5, 2005... Swedes this Christmas are expected to ship more packages than any year in memory. Sweden Post is predicting a massive upturn for Christmas 2005. The growing popularity of home shopping is a major factor. According to a recent survey, 61% of...

Japan post reported in joint venture.(Mitsubishi Trust and Banking Corp.)(Brief article)
December 5, 2005... According to the Asahi Shimbun, which quoted anonymous sources, Japan Post, in preparation for its coming privatization, is putting together a joint venture with a wholly owned subsidiary of Mitsubishi UFJ Trust and Banking Corporation to...

FedEx to chuck SuperTracker for PowerPad.
December 5, 2005... FedEx Express plans to equip 50,000 couriers in 60 countries with wireless devices by 2008. The FedEx PowerPad, a Windows Pocket PC-based device, is Bluetooth-enabled and fitted out with General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) connectivity. It...

Austrian post to buy German courier.(Osterreichische Postsparkasse acquires Trans-O-Flex Internationaler Schnell-Lieferdienst GmbH)(Brief article)
December 5, 2005... Osterreichische Post is going to take over the German courtier, express and parcel operator trans-o-flex Schnell-Lieferdienst GmbH, the outfit that just tied up with Oracle to make its existing IT environment completely RFID. The Austrian...

EC okays Exel acquisition.
December 5, 2005... The European Commission has rubberstamped Deutsche Post World Net's acquisition of UK-based logistics provider Exel, the last major hurdle to the deal. The US Federal Trade Commission already cleared the deal. Exel does roughly 30% of its...

How much IP do you suppose you can get for $40m?
December 5, 2005... Apparently the newfangled non-profit Open Invention Network (OIN) patent-neutering scheme put in train by IBM, Novell, Red Hat, Philips and Sony to buy up patents that Linux might infringe didn't quite come together the way it was supposed to....

Intel reportedly Rejigs its famous brand.
December 5, 2005... It looks like Eric Kim, the Samsung import now running Intel's corporate marketing, is apparently going to leave his mark on the company by redoing the famous Intel Inside logo. The remake--samples of which happened to reach a French site...

Microsoft is shopping for a new MBS chief.
December 5, 2005... Doug Burgum, the guy who's been running Microsoft's business applications unit day-to-day for the last five years ever since Microsoft bought him and Great Plains, is going to become its chairman, a novel new title, according to the Wall Street...

Post-Carly, HP's getting it together.
December 5, 2005... Well, now here are words you don't hear everyday: HP had a better quarter than Dell. At least nobody's questioning HP's business model right this moment. The HP board should be pleased. Performance is tickling the stock price. Amazing as...

Sun ups the core race.
December 5, 2005... You can't get a Niagara box just yet, but Sun has announced the much-heralded chip officially changing its name to the UltraSparc T1, an eight-core 90nm number that will be put into new Sun Fire servers sometime in December. Each core is good...

AMD comes out swinging.
December 5, 2005... AMD got aggressive at its analysts day and said it'll be gunning for 2x market growth, which it thinks will be 10% year-over-year, led by servers where it's becoming a "safe" choice and where it wants 20% of the market next year, up from the...

IBM viper rears its head.
December 5, 2005... Ahead of release next year, IBM has previewed Viper, its next DB2 take, which is supposed to be designed for this newfangled Service Oriented Architecture stuff, saying it would go into beta with customers, developers and partners. It's...

If Sony thinks this is bad, wait till it gets the legal bill.
December 5, 2005... In the face of consumer outrage and at the cost of a few million dollars, Sony BMG has recalled all those millions of CDs it's got out there with the copy-restriction software, a k a rootkit, that's created such a hubbub. Sony BMG...

Sun goes with Postgres.
December 5, 2005... Yracle's sometimes best friend Sun is going to distribute and support the open source Postgres database 24x7 with Solaris 10. Sun didn't say so until after Oracle named Solaris its preferred 64-bit open source development and deployment...

Serena knocked down for $1.2b.
December 5, 2005... Investment house Silver Lake Partners is buying Serena Software for a whopping $1.2 billion after a limited auction run by Morgan Stanley. It is taking it private. Company founder and chairman Douglas Troxe, who owns maybe 28% of the...

Oracle continues to binge but it's taking small bites.(Thor Technologies Inc. acquired)(Brief article)
December 5, 2005... Oracle has bought Thor Technologies, the cross-platform provisioner, and OctetString, the virtual directory ISV, in the name of strengthening its security offerings inside the firewall. Financial terms were not disclosed and probably aren't...

Microsoft inches closer to HPC.
December 5, 2005... To mark its upcoming entry into HPC, Microsoft released a second--this time public--beta of Windows Compute Cluster Server and said it would fund joint research projects at 10 academic centers around the world. Microsoft said Compute...

Office 12 betas.(Microsoft Corp.)(Brief article)
December 5, 2005... Microsoft has sent an expected Office 12 Beta 1 to 10,000 selected testers. A broader beta is set for March with the actual product due in the second half of next year round about when Vista is supposed to materialize. The beta reportedly...

IBM buys collation.
December 5, 2005... IBM has acquired privately held Collation, a four-year-old company backed by Worldview Technology Partners and Prism Venture Partners that makes software for pinpointing problems in corporate data centers. Financial terms were not disclosed....

Microsoft settles with Daum for $30m.
December 5, 2005... Microsoft has settled the four-year-old antitrust claims made by Daum Communications, which operates South Korea's largest portal and reportedly controls a good piece of the Korean instant messaging market, for $30 million, including $10...

Intel's virtualization widgetry inches out.
December 5, 2005... Intel has finally started delivering its virtualization technology (VT) on the desktop except it's going to have relatively limited circulation. None of the first-tier companies are picking it up, preferring to wait until next year when...

Microsoft tries to simplify licensing.
December 5, 2005... Microsoft has released an early version of an online tool called the Product Licensing Advisor that's supposed to simplify license-related decisions. It's targeted at corporate customers who acquire Microsoft software through volume contracts....

ClearCube unbundles for IBM.
December 5, 2005... After a year working things out, ClearCube Technology, the PC blade pioneer, has cut a deal for IBM to resell just its software on the BladeCenter, the first time ClearCube has ever unbundled its software. IBM wants a virtualized client...

HP gets cozier with SMS & MOM.
December 5, 2005... HP says it's enhancing integration with Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS), updating integration with Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM), and supporting the emerging WS Management standard. The two companies are collaborating on...

IBM acts on NetApp pact.
December 5, 2005... This month IBM is going to ship two mid-range appliances, the N5500 and the N5200, that are re-branded versions of Network Appliance's FAS 3050 and FAS 3020. The first can be configured with up to 336 hard drives for a capacity of up to...

Xandros learns German.(Xandros Corp. introduces German version of desktop operating system)(Brief article)
December 5, 2005... Xandros, a name you don't hear much any more, popped up in Frankfurt-am-Main, with a German version of its Corel-derived Debian-based desktop operating system, saying it was responding to demand for a Windows alternative. It says the...

Andy's eight-way does Tokyo.(Andy Bechtolsheim to develop a eight way Opteron box)(Brief article)
December 5, 2005... Sun's design maven Andy Bechtolsheim has been promising to deliver an eight-way Opteron box and it looks like that's what's underneath the massive 100 teraFLOP Sun Fire x86-based grid that's going into the Tokyo Institute Technology. It'll...

Just call me CA.
December 5, 2005... To distinguish it from the company that got into trouble with the government for fiddling with its numbers, the new reform management of Computer Associates has decided that the company should simply be called CA from now on.

SAP halts big Oracle contract.
December 5, 2005... The US Air Force has put an $88.5 million contract awarded to Oracle on hold while it goes off and investigates a formal protest lodged by SAP. The inquiry could take another two months.

IBM marketing chief resigns.
December 5, 2005... Effective January 3, IBM's marketing chief Abby Kohnstamm, who came to the company with the Gerstner administration, consolidated IBM's 80 ad agencies down to one and helped develop its eBusiness campaign, is leaving to pursue other marketing,...

A cheaper Microsoft Virtual Server 2 due.
December 5, 2005... Microsoft Virtual Server Release 2 is due out this month priced at $99 a server for the standard edition and $199 for the enterprise version. Microsoft cut its prices like 80%. It was $499 and $899 respectively.

Microsoft won't play host.
December 5, 2005... Microsoft says it's won't host its Dynamics CRM 3.0 product but depend on partners to host the pay-as-you-go service. The product will be made available as a packaged product for those people who want to run the CRM software in-house.

HP's ultimatum didn't work.
December 5, 2005... HP recently threatened to change sides in the great DVD format debate if the Blu-ray Disc Association didn't add two PC-favoring technologies to its spec--mandatory managed copy (MMC) so users could copy a high-definition movie to run on...

ICANN lives.(Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers)(creating own internet)(Brief article)
December 5, 2005... It's not exactly clear what we averted--Zimbabwe stomping off to create its own Internet?--but all the blather of the last few weeks about how the UN--and not the US--should run the Internet seems to have been defused by throwing the...

Intel to invest in Middle East.
December 5, 2005... Intel has set up a $50 million venture capital fund to invest in technology companies in the Middle East and Turkey. It says the money could go into hardware, services (including broadband infrastructure and mobile wireless solutions using...

Dell's hold for pickup shipping agent uses ICT alerts.
December 12, 2005... APX Logistics Inc, the American B2C package delivery outfit that Dell is using to ship low-end machines through the USPS' new Hold for Pickup service, has gone to the ICT Group Inc, a provider of customer management and business process...

CDs/DVDs reportedly mailed wrong.
December 12, 2005... The USPS doesn't require automation-compatible mail; it requires mail that's compatible with DMM regulations. Postal management refuses to require automation-compatible mail from its CD/DVD customers, according to Butler Mailing Services Inc,...

Harte-hanks melds LACSLink in ADQ.
December 12, 2005... Harte-Hanks, Inc, the direct marketing and targeted media company, says its data quality services offering, Harte-Hanks Advanced Data Quality (ADQ), now includes LACSLink, the United States Postal Service widgetry that provides mailers with an...

La Poste to enter banking sector.
December 12, 2005... Over the opposition of conventional banks, which have threatened to complain to the European Union, French regulators have given La Poste their blessing to launch banking services at its 17,000 branches. The new unit, a mortgage competitor, is...

US APCs in 2,500 sites.
December 12, 2005... The US Postal Service says more than 2,500 Automated Postal Centers (APCs) have been installed in postal facilities. Just as an ATM is a virtual standalone bank, the APC is a virtual, standalone post office. The agency says the APC does...

John Sadler joins BOWE BELL + HOWELL.(Bowe Bell & Howell Co.)(Brief Article)
December 12, 2005... BOWE BELL + HOWELL has hired John Sadle, a veteran of the USPS, as its director of postal relations. During his tenure with the USPS, Sadler was instrumental in creating and managing quality programs that increased efficiencies in postal...

Microsoft sends XML file formats to ECMA.
December 12, 2005... Circumstances--like the state of Massachusetts throwing its unqualified support behind the rival IBM/Sun-created, Oasis-blessed, OpenOffice-supported OpenDocument Format (ODF) and threatening to toss Microsoft out on its ear--has pushed...

Dublin GPO to become a memorial.(genearl post office)(Brief Article)
December 12, 2005... The General Post Office on O'Connell Street in Dublin, arguably the single most famous post office in the world, will cease to be a post office and be designated a permanent memorial to the 1916 Easter Rising. When exactly is unclear, but plans...

Sun throws in towel on open source debate; 'frees' its software.
December 12, 2005... Sun has decided to chase the open source model and make its software "free"--and ultimately open source--on the theory that "open source is the future" and that it's not too late for Sun to amass volume. With Sun open source isn't a...

Ah, politics.
December 12, 2005... Massachusetts appears to be warming a bit to Microsoft. Its governor, Mitt Romney, said the other day that the state was "optimistic" that Microsoft's Office Open XML file formats will ultimately meet its procurement policies. The...

More softies headed to sensitivity training.
December 12, 2005... In the wake of getting caught out sending media player makers a supposedly draft contract restricting whose software they could bundle, Microsoft is sensitizing more of its employees to antitrust basics and has asked a former antitrust official...

Symantec, McAfee under attack.
December 12, 2005... The lives of Symantec and McAfee are slowly turning into a living hell. Not only have hackers tired of harassing Microsoft and turned their attention to incapacitating Norton and such but now Microsoft has moved its threatening Windows OneCare...

Co-founder abandons cray ivory tower for M'soft sandbox.
December 12, 2005... Cray co-founder and chief scientist Burton Smith, a big wheel in HPC circles, has jumped ship to go to Microsoft in a role that has yet to be described other than calling him a technical fellow but Microsoft needs any HPC help it can get to...

The countdown to GPLv3 starts.
December 12, 2005... The Free Software Foundation (FSF) says it will begin circulating its long-promised update of the famed General Public License (GPL), the hearthstone of the open source movement--the thing Steve Ballmer once called a "cancer"--on January 16 at...

USPS expands key contract.
December 12, 2005... The USPS has modified its contract with Nortel PEC Solutions, the Virginia-based Nortel subsidiary focused on high-end government solutions and services. Nortel will get another $21 million for another year of service and support, including the...

NEC & Stratus tighten their links.(Stratus Computer Inc.)(Brief Article)
December 12, 2005... Mtratus Technologies and NEC, already joined at the hip, have signed two 10-year pacts covering joint product development and a long-term hardware purchasing arrangement. NEC also has committed to increase its equity position in Stratus to 3%...

Intel & Micron form NAND venture.
December 12, 2005... You have of course heard that Intel and Micron Technology are going into the NAND flash memory business together, kicking in roughly $1.2 billion each in cash, notes and assets to start and at least another $1.4 billion each over the next three...

Cisco chases video.
December 12, 2005... Cisco, one of the biggest patchwork quilts in the industry, is paying roughly $6.9 billion to buy Scientific-Atlanta, a move deemed brilliant so long as set-top boxes remain a digital media centerpiece. Cisco, which hasn't been in the...

SCO gets $10m 'vote of confidence'.
December 12, 2005... The SCO Group, the industry's favorite whipping boy, sent a message to IBM the other day saying it wasn't about to disappear. It said it had completed a private placement and sold $10 million worth of new stock to a half-dozen existing...

Judge tells Larry to pay his own bills.
December 12, 2005... The judge hearing that civil case accusing Oracle CEO Larry Ellison of insider stock trading abuses in 2001 is making the billionaire pay his own legal bills. Ellison, who agreed to donate $100 million to charity by way of restitution for...

SCO reportedly wins mock trial.
December 12, 2005... The following message appeared for an instant Thursday morning before it disappeared from Groklaw, the SCO hate site. "I work in Salt Lake," it said. "A co-worker's spouse participated in a mock jury trial simulation for a law firm; by the...

Novell names new CTO.
December 12, 2005... Novell has named Jeffrey Jaffe chief technology officer, responsible for the company's technology direction as well as its product business units. Jaffe has been at Lucent Technologies for the last five years as president of Bell Labs...

Novell looks better than it has in a long time.
December 12, 2005... After writing off $38 million in restructuring charges and another $2 million in impaired investments and intangible assets, Novell lost $5 million, a penny a share, on revenues that were relatively flat at $320 million in its fourth fiscal...

Intel could be America-free.
December 12, 2005... Intel finally admitted what we already knew thanks to Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. It will build a 300mm wafer fab at Kiryat Gat in Israel in support of its 45nm process. The $3.5 billion plant, Intel's second 45nm factory and its...

Intel name-drops.
December 12, 2005... Back in August when Intel wheeled out its newfangled ViiV (rhymes with five) digital home platform technology, it said it had a bunch of camp followers in train to get the widgetry to market. The other say it identified 40 of them, including...

HP's software boss quits.
December 12, 2005... HP has lost its software chief Nora Denzel, who reportedly resigned for personal reasons. OpenView general manager Todd DeLaughter will replace her for the time being. Before software, Denzel, who came to HP from Legato, ran HP's storage...

It's ugly in the Time Warner board room.
December 12, 2005... Hedge fund activist Carl Icahn is threatening to sue the Time Warner board--personally--if "they give away AOL the wrong way for the wrong reasons." What exactly would please Mr. Icahn, aside from the immediate departure of Time Warner CEO...

XML Catalogs standardized.
December 12, 2005... Oasis has made XML Catalogs 1.1 a standard, calling it a big step forward for interoperability of XML documents. XML Catalogs is the widgetry that defines mechanisms to facilitate machine processing of XML entities associated with external...

TNT to shuck logistics, buy into China, take on DHL.
December 19, 2005... Last week publicly owned TNT NV, which operates the Dutch postal service, said it wants to sell its $4 billion logistics business, complaining that its synergies with the mail weren't enough and that it didn't get the return it wanted. ...

Czech Post electronic signature services go live.
December 19, 2005... Cybertrust, the security specialist, announced the successful implementation of electronic signature services by Czech Post, the Czech Republic's biggest postal service supplier. Czech Post is now one of only three accredited distributors...

Swisscom certified to provide electronic signatures.
December 19, 2005... Swisscom Solutions, an offshoot of the big Swiss telecoms house, is the first company in Switzerland to be certified to provide qualified electronic signature services since the Swiss Signatures Act (ZertES) came into force on January 1 of this...

UPS seeks to avoid post-holiday blip: Bear Stearns.
December 19, 2005... Bear Stearns has had a tete-a-tete with UPS and says the company is very focused on making sure that last year's post-Christmas operational blip does not happen again this year. The broker, however, says although the company will make earnings...

PGP gets second round.
December 19, 2005... PGP, the encryption and digital signature house, has gotten a $10 million second round from DCM-Doll Capital Management, Venrock Associates, SVB Capital and Silicon Valley Bank on the heels on its best bookings ever. The money is supposed to...

Windows Book claims to be cheaper than UPS.
December 19, 2005... Window Book Inc, the postal mailing and shipping solutions house, has launched its Your First Priority System for shipping lightweight items and documents. It invites shippers to use its online Savings Calculator at...

Japan Post must brace for more competition.
December 19, 2005... Japan's Ministry of Communications is considering relaxing its regulations, watering down Japan Post's monopoly some more and letting private companies deliver the mail nationwide, according to a story in the Nihon Keizai Shimbun. A decision...

Royal Mail finds Xmas sales ramped early.
December 19, 2005... The Royal Mail says online shoppers are being enticed onto the web earlier this year as Internet retailers provide a range of incentives to win a bigger share of holiday sales. A Royal Mail survey found 55% of online retailers are using a...

AOL watch.
December 19, 2005... Last week leaks to the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times were saying that Time Warner wasn't going to sell anybody a piece of AOL and that the potential deals on the table were more about whether Microsoft would replace Google as AOL's...

Sun goes on offense against Intel.
December 19, 2005... Sun Microsystems has pushed out its much-anticipated Niagara servers, claiming to be five years ahead of rivals Intel and IBM largely because of the radical new eightcore/32-thread 1.2GHz T1 Sparc chip underlying the two new systems. Sun...

Sun to open source Niagara chip.
December 19, 2005... While it was busy launching its new Niagara-based servers, Sun Microsystems said it would open source the UltraSparc T1 processor that was code named Niagara and is underneath the widgets. It's calling the project OpenSparc. This is after...

Oracle temporarily adjusts pricing for Niagara.
December 19, 2005... Oracle, Symantec, BEA and a bunch of other ISVs threw their support behind Sun's newfangled Niagara-based T1000 and T2000. In fact, Oracle, which would love to count every core on these multi-core thingies as a separate processor and is...

Niagara Falls on floating point.
December 19, 2005... Sun CEO Scott McNealy has been telling the press that Sun would ship 5,000-10,000 Sun Fire T2000s this quarter, the first of the Niagara-based machines to become available. The smaller T1000 apparently won't be ready to go until March. By...

Korean trustbusters find Microsoft guilty of tying.
December 19, 2005... What Microsoft feared would happen has happened. Southern Korean regulators have found it guilty of tying and told it to unbundle its Windows Messenger and Media Player from Windows. The company has been told to produce two versions of Windows...