ePostal News articles from December 2006

ePostal News archives from December 2006

Stamps.com files massive Internet postage suit against Endicia & PSI systems.
December 11, 2006... Stamps.com has sued Endicia Inc and PSI Systems Inc claiming that they are infringing on 11 Stamps.com patents and demanding treble damages for willful infringement. Stamps.com said the patents cover Internet postage technology in a filing with...

Deutsche Post to offer new digitizing service.(Brief article)
December 11, 2006... Starting in January Deutsche Post will be offering to digitizing the mail its corporate customers get. It's going to have digitizing facilities in Berlin, Cologne, Frankfurt, Munich, Essen, Hamburg, Stuttgart and Hanover, branching out to...

Belgian Post declares 'E-trade week'.(Belgian Post Group)(Brief article)
December 11, 2006... With more and more Belgians taking to e-commerce, the Belgian Post declared this past week "E-trade week" and has been offering to deliver any item sold on Internet at a reduced rate. The offer marks the one-year anniversary of La Poste's...

The post & RFID.
December 11, 2006... Post is the second biggest potential application of item-level RFID after retail. It could rise to a projected billion items a year. The USPS, DHL USA, Denmark's Lyngsoe Systems, Spain's AIDA Centre-RFID Solutions and Lockheed Martin will be...

Postal Benchmarking Club started.
December 11, 2006... Triangle Management Service Ltd, the British-based research house and consultancy, started what it calls a Postal Benchmarking Club at the recent UPU Strategy Conference in Dubai. It is seeking to attract small and mid-sized posts and has...

Online Xmas sales projected to be up 18% in the US.(online retail and holiday business forecast)(Brief article)
December 11, 2006... Industry analysts at Jupiter Research expect US online retail sales this Christmas will be up 18% over last year. As a service provider to 20 of the top 25 e-retailers identified by Internet Retailer magazine, UPS expects more than 130...

World Trade Center still gets mail.
December 11, 2006... The United States Postal Service said the other day that five years after 9/11 it is still processing hundreds of pieces of mail sent to the World Trade Center every day. The USPS attributes this macabre phenomenon to mailers not updating their...

Yawn, Vista starts moving out.
December 11, 2006... Ignore for the moment that Microsoft IPO'd 20 years ago this past March. Last Thursday, the day that Vista finally went to volume-license business accounts, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer turned up at the Nasdaq to ring the opening bell to...

Hitachi elbows into the virtualization game.
December 11, 2006... EMC may want to ask Santa for a Hitachi doll that it can stick pins in because Hitachi, already a burr under EMC's storage saddle, is going to be agitating to steal business from EMC's VMware unit. Hitachi claims to have a mainframe-derived...

AMD Fields ersatz quad, demos real one.
December 11, 2006... Intel has an Extreme quad so AMD, which isn't supposedly to have a quad for months, felt compelled to do something, so it's wheeled out a bastard quad that breaks AMD's rules about sticking all the cores on a single sliver of silicon. ...

Microsoft clears EC deadline by a hair.
December 11, 2006... Microsoft made its Thanksgiving Day deadline to fill in the holes that the European Commission says still exist in its protocol documentation, holes that could cost Microsoft a whole new round of bruising $3.9 million-a-day fines on top of the...

Intuit spends $1.35b on Digital Insight.
December 11, 2006... Intuit is plunking down $1.35 billion to buy Digital Insight, a California-based provider of online banking services that has been having trouble marketing directly. Intuit wants to tickle its own revenue growth. Together the pair will...

Not to decide is to decide: Corel.
December 11, 2006... Corel says WordPerfect Office will be updated to support both the OASIS Open Document Format (ODF) and Microsoft's Open XML (OOXML), claiming the move will put it in a "unique format-neutral position, independent of Microsoft, Adobe and other...

HP Fields blade workstation.
December 11, 2006... HP has introduced what it calls the industry's first blade workstation. Based on its BladeSystem infrastructure, the ProLiant Blade Workstation Solution is supposed to give users workstation compute power from anywhere using thin clients...

Novell's next trick after Microsoft.
December 11, 2006... Novell has put out four products from what it called its desktop-to-data center management initiative, describing them as the "next steps in its plan to deliver interoperable cross-platform management solutions" after its Microsoft deal. ...

And presumably a death ray shield goes with the job?
December 11, 2006... Novell has confirmed that Susan Heystee, its recently named manager of global strategic partners, is going to handle its newfangled relationship with Microsoft, which was what people assumed when she got the job. She's supposed to manage both...

French linspire arrives.(Linspire launches French version of desktop Linux software)(Brief article)
December 11, 2006... Linspire says its community has produced a French version of its desktop Linux software, the first of many translations it expects to release soon. The company's localization efforts include the Debian-based operating system and key...

OIN sends out for a suit of armor.
December 11, 2006... "[Microsoft's] claims are baseless. In fact, there have been no patent suits against Linux. While patent disputes are not unheard of between and among software developers and distributors, they are almost always resolved between these...

Bricklin's back--well almost.(Dan Bricklin to launch his new spreadsheet wikiCalc)(Brief article)
December 11, 2006... Any minute now Dan Bricklin, the guy who co-invented VisiCalc back in the olden days--and so precipitated the computer revolution--is going to deliver the first release of wikiCalc, a GPL 2-governed next-generation spreadsheet written in the...

US Congress passes 'historic postal reform' bill at the 11th hour.(Brief article)
December 18, 2006... With minutes to go before it went home for Christmas the US Congress Saturday passed what it called "historic postal reform legislation"--based on an agreement brokered by small group of senators and congressmen--that is supposed to overhaul...

USPS to bring in more SteelCloud servers.
December 18, 2006... The US Postal Service's Engineering Department has let a roughly $10 million contract to systems integrator SteelCloud Inc for specialized servers for its Flats Recognition Improvement Program (FRIP), aimed at increasing the recognition rates...

DHL & IBM develop IT logistics platform for Karstadt.
December 18, 2006... DHL Exel Supply Chain, the logistics specialist at Deutsche Post World Net, and IBM's consulting arm Global Business Services have developed a new IT-based warehouse-management solution for German department store Karstadt Warenhaus GmbH. ...

Germany to push on liberalization.(liberalization of postal services)(Brief article)
December 18, 2006... Germany, the country to be president of the European Union the first half of next year, will reportedly push for agreement among member states on complete postal liberalization at a meeting at the end of June, according to Agence-France Presse....

IBM sues newfangled 'open systems' mainframe wannabe.
December 18, 2006... IBM, sounding both hopping mad and sorely offended, has sued newfangled PCM start-up Platform Solutions Inc (PSI), the outfit trying to build servers that run IBM's z/OS mainframe operating system out of Intel's Itanium chips. It claims PSI...

HP settles spy rap with California.
December 18, 2006... HP has managed to wriggle off the hook with the California Attorney General's office as far as its silly headline-rich boardroom-directed spying adventure goes. It's cut a deal to avoid prosecution on the civil charges that the AG has been...

Note to Yahoo: Souffles have a tendency to fall.
December 18, 2006... Yahoo has reorganized its upper echelon out of fear of Google gobbling up the world and being punished some more by Wall Street where it's given one of the year's worst performances, its stock down 30-odd percent and its earnings drooping even...

Partial IM peace accord brokered.
December 18, 2006... That rarified group of folks who use IBM Sametime's instant messenger can now talk to AOL AIM and Google Talk users, with Yahoo Messenger interoperability reportedly just around the corner according to IBM, which figures that will let Sametime...

Intel to compete against OLPC box.
December 18, 2006... The Brazilian government has agreed to a runoff among MIT's now $150 One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) device, a $400 Intel "Classmate PC" and a dark horse from an Indian firm next year, according to an AP report out of Sao Paulo. It quoted Intel as...

No fix for Novell until 2008, its CEO says.
December 18, 2006... Novell, which is attracting far more attention than it usually does because of its deal with Microsoft, earned $25 million, or six cents a share, in its fourth fiscal quarter on revenues down 15% to $245 million. This time last year it lost $6...

Novell to support Microsoft's document format in OpenOffice.
December 18, 2006... Novell is going down a path just cleared by Coral and says it's going to support Microsoft's Open XML file format in its edition of OpenOffice. Coral said last week that WordPerfect would support both Open XML and the OASIS Open Document...

Amazon backs Wikia.
December 18, 2006... Amazon has put an undisclosed amount of money into Wikia, a start-up ad-based commercial wiki site put together by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. Wikia is supposed to appeal to niche communities like comic book fanciers and "X-Files" fans....

PCs on a diet.
December 18, 2006... Merrill Lynch says Vista's client and bandwidth overhead favors server-based computing with thin-client virtual desktops. In a survey of 100 CIOs it found that 4% of them have adopted thin client alternatives to PCs and another 28% are...

Wonder if they'll call it the HP act ...
December 18, 2006... In the wake of the HP kerfuffle, Congress is moving toward removing any ambiguity and outlawing pretexting, making it a federal crime to obtain someone's phone records without his permission. According to the Wall Street Journal the legislation...

Did Oracle flub the quarter?
December 18, 2006... Lehman Brothers hung a profit-harvesting sell sign on Oracle's stock Wednesday fearing its core database sales may miss Wall Street expectations when it reports its second fiscal quarter on December 18. It thinks Oracle has had problems closing...