ePostal News articles from December 2008

ePostal News archives from December 2008

Swiss Post To Supply Healthcare Network.(Brief article)
December 1, 2008... Swiss Post is going to manage a pilot project to electronically network doctors, hospitals and druggists for the canton of Geneva. The post will supply its security technology and parts of its infrastructure. The pilot is expected to begin...

UPU Keeps .Post RFI Responses Under Wraps.
December 1, 2008... The Universal Postal Union (UPU) is keeping secret the responses made to its Request for Information (RFI) seeking proposals on the management and operation of a .post Top-Level Domain. Microsoft, VeriSign, NeuStar and Earth Class Mail are...

Slovakia to EC: 'The State Is No Chicken To Be Plucked'.
December 1, 2008... Slovakia is going to resist the European Commission's legally binding decision that it must open up its hybrid postal services to competition. According to TASR-Slovakia, the country's partially state-funded news service, the government has...

UK Mail Goes Hybrid, Threatens Classic First-Class Mail.
December 1, 2008... UK Mail, part of the Business Post Group (BPG), claims to have created a national alternative to traditional first-class postal service. Its newly launched imail, a species of hybrid mail, is targeted at large corporations, SMEs and consumers...

Post Fiji Signs with the Escher Group.(Brief article)
December 1, 2008... Post Fiji Limited has formalized its partnership with the Escher Group to upgrade the counter automation systems at its 29 online outlets throughout Fiji. The postal company signed an agreement with the company for Escher's postal counter...

Goodmail Adds to its Kitty.
December 1, 2008... At a time when getting funding is said to be like squeezing blood from a stone, Goodmail Systems, the creator of CertifiedEmail, has managed to raise a $20 million C round led by Bessemer Venture Partners. DCM, Emergence Capital Partners and...

Correios of Brazil Revs Electronic Postal System.
December 1, 2008... The Brazilian Post Office has released version 2 of its Electronic Post Office System or Sistema de Postagem Eletrnica Escritrio (SPE-e) with free software that lets people send letters and telegrams on the Internet using their own computers....

Mind Mapping in the Cloud.
December 1, 2008... Apple's not the only one telling people to "Think Different." So is an outfit called Mindjet. It's into mind mapping, which isn't as chilling as it sounds. It's merely a way of brainstorming and diagramming non-linear thinking that actually...

Cloud Envelops Exchange & SharePoint.
December 1, 2008... Microsoft has pushed multi-tenant SaaS versions of Exchange and SharePoint out of the beta nest. Some 7,000 concerns participated in the beta. Now the stuff's available to all comers. Exchange Online will cost $10 per user a month; SharePoint...

Microsoft Says No to Yahoo Acquisition - Again.
December 1, 2008... Microsoft is open to a search deal with Yahoo, "very open" apparently, but CEO Steve Ballmer again nixed the thought of revisiting an acquisition, according to both the AP and Reuters. The AP quotes him as saying, "Let me be clear. We are done...

Amazon Launches CloudFront.
December 1, 2008... Amazon has launched a HTTP content delivery service (CDN) called CloudFront that works with its S3 cloud storage widgetry and EC2. It's now a public beta, having been privately tested the last couple few months. It's the stuff Amazon promised...

Cute Trick Saves Dell's Bad News from Looking Worse.
December 1, 2008... At the end of one of the worst days in the history of Wall Street, when every metric ultimately reacted like acid eating through a thin plate of copper, Dell posted its third-quarter results, returning a surprise 9% increase in EPS on deflated...

Intel's New Chip is Here.
December 1, 2008... Intel's most complex x86 desktop chip ever, a tiny part loaded with an incredible 731 million transistors that's been five years in the making, has been released to the most dubious demand environment ever, especially for desktops - dubious...

HP: Economic Contrarian.
December 1, 2008... HP jumped the gun and told the worried multitudes a week ahead of when it's supposed to release its latest numbers that it more than just survived the volatile quarter it just ended in October when the bottom fell out of the economy. Not only...

HP Says It's Got Cheaper Virtualization.
December 1, 2008... HP says it can cut the pricey-but-neglected costs of networking virtualized environments by 55%. Your average VMware ESX server busily hosting virtual machines requires six network connections, which means network expansion cards, switches and...

ARM To Get Flash.(Brief article)
December 1, 2008... Adobe and ARM are gonna put Flash Player 10 and AIR, the stuff of web video and rich Internet apps, on ARM widgets by the second half of next year. They mean phones, set-tops, MIDs, TVs, car mojo and personal media devices, which have so far...

Cloud Has Shrinking Effect on StarOffice Price Tag.
December 1, 2008... First Sun Microsystems, its fortunes about as low as a snake's belly, moved its StarOffice franchise into a new Cloud Computing unit with clear instructions to "grow revenues." Then a couple days later StarOffice 9, the latest rev of the...

MySQL Add-on Could Make Sun Money.
December 1, 2008... Sun, which desperately needs to monetize its software, has put out a new release of MySQL with a gold-level subscriber-only Query Analyzer tool that it's praying users will pay for. The tool monitors query performance and quickly pinpoints and...

Taking Yahoo Apart Brick by Brick?
December 1, 2008... Seems Microsoft, which doesn't want to buy Yahoo anymore, has rustled Yahoo's VP of search technology Sean Suchter, the Inktomi legacy who ran Yahoo's search engine, responsible for engineering and P&L. He's due to leave Yahoo right before...

Royal Delivers First Commercial Matter Boxes.
December 8, 2008... Royal Mail has packed its first commercial Matter box containing free brand representations from a range of international household names and delivered it to more than 30,000 UK consumers this past weekend. Royal Mail rolled out Matter, a...

Black Friday Sales a Surprise.
December 8, 2008... Sales on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving and the traditional kickoff of holiday shopping in the US, rose 3% to $10.6 billion according to ShopperTrak RCT Corporation. The findings came as a surprise given the bleakness of the economy....

Pitney Bowes & Zazzle Team on Corporate Promotions.
December 8, 2008... Pitney Bowes and Zazzle, the Stamps.com-like vanity postage and promotions outfit, already joined at the hip, have launched an online retail center for customized business products. Pitney is the postage engine behind Zazzle's customized...

Deutsche Post Adds Mobile Portal.
December 8, 2008... Deutsche Post has launched an Internet portal for users of mobile phones at http://m.deutschepost.de. It's hoping people use it to design, write and send postcards and letters in an exercise in hybrid mail. In case the user is...

UPS Plays with Virtual 'Regifting'.
December 8, 2008... In a bit of attention-seeking silliness, UPS has set up a web site where you can send virtual regifts - not the real white elephants you've been given over the years - but virtual ones. UPS imagines regifters uploading a photo of their unwanted...

The Netherlands Postpones Full Liberalization.(Brief article)
December 8, 2008... The Dutch government on Friday again postponed a decision on completely opening up the country's postal sector to competition. It reportedly wants to talk further to all concerned - postal companies and unions - about working conditions. In the...

India Post Partners with Deutsche Post World Net.(Brief article)
December 8, 2008... Deutsche Post World Net (DPWN), which is down on its uppers in the US and has indicated it was shifting its focus to Asia, has cut a deal to expand India Post's international express delivery service (EMS). India Post currently offers EMS to 97...

Korea Post Eyes Central Asia.(Brief article)
December 8, 2008... The state-run Korea Post has expansionist designs in central Asia. Last week it signed a cooperative memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. IT is a particular concern, a reason for Korea and...

Icahn Buys Still More Yahoo Stock.
December 8, 2008... Carl Icahn, the activist stockholder - and champion of the apparently futile "Microsoft Buys Yahoo" plan - who pushed his way onto the Yahoo board by dint of a threatened proxy fight, bought roughly 6.7 million shares of Yahoo the Monday,...

Dell Offers 0% Financing.
December 8, 2008... With its Q3 sales down 3% and demand fearfully thin, Dell is tearing a page out of Microsoft's book and is going to offer US businesses 0% financing. It's focusing on large corporations and institutions but some smaller shops should also...

IBM Wants Its Initials on All Clouds Everywhere.
December 8, 2008... In a fascinating move to co-op the cloud, IBM is proposing to rate other people's clouds, people like Amazon, GoGrid, Mosso and FlexiScale. Hopefully it will do better than Moody's and Standard & Poor's did with the bonds created out of...

Cost Cutting, Laptops & EDS Do It for HP.
December 8, 2008... HP, which lifted its skirt and showed everybody its panties ahead of time, officially released its better-than-expected fiscal Q4 results and repeated its relatively aggressive guidance for the current quarter. As it said it would, it ponied up...

iSuppli Cuts PC Forecast.
December 8, 2008... iSuppli has taken the auspices again and now says that PCs won't grow next year by 11.9% like it thought before the sky started falling. Sales will only be up 4.3%, up being better than down let's remember. And it's not quite as optimistic...

Microsoft's Sky Filled with Clouds.
December 8, 2008... Microsoft plans to build about 20 "super-size" cloud data centers, each with a price tag of around a billion dollars apiece, according to BusinessWeek. The magazine got it from an unnamed source. All Microsoft's VP of global foundation...

Google Shrinking.
December 8, 2008... Google is significantly reducing the number of contract workers it uses but says it won't cut its staff of 21,123 people, according to the Wall Street Journal. It remains unclear how many of its 10,000 contractors Google will be cut. Apparently...

Netbooks Get Another Taker.
December 8, 2008... Add Fujitsu's name to the list of Atom-based netbook hawkers.

Fedora 10 Out.
December 8, 2008... Fedora 10 is out and about. Fedora of course is Red Hat's freebie community OS and testbed for coming attractions in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The new rev is supposed to have substantial virtualization improvements for remotely installing and...

rPath Broadens its Pitch.(rPath has introduced management system for creating virtual appliances and application images)(Brief article)
December 8, 2008... Besides SUSE and its own brand of Linux, rPath is now supporting the Ubuntu and CentOS Linux operating systems as part of its rBuilder and rPath Lifecycle Management Platform. The move broadens the start-up's options for deploying and managing...

Microsoft & Novell Still Together Two Years Later.
December 8, 2008... The two-year anniversary of the Novell-Microsoft alliance that scandalized the open source community passed quietly enough earlier this month. The pair waited a couple of weeks to mark the occasion and then said that in the second year of...

SkyPostal Expands Internet Shopping Services to Middle East.
December 15, 2008... SkyPostal Networks, the largest private postal network in Latin America, has entered into a joint venture agreement with E-Commerce Ltd in Kuwait to expand its Punto Mio online shopping facilitator services to the Middle East. Punto Mio...

TNT Cuts Guidance; Mail Delivery Could Shrink to Three Days a Week.
December 15, 2008... Dutch mail and logistics house TNT NV has cut the outlook for its express unit again because of the global economy. "Volumes, overall and in particular in the premium express market in Europe, continue to decrease and are now well below...

US Holiday Shopping Looks Surprisingly Solid So Far.
December 15, 2008... After sales on Black Friday, when holiday shopping kicks off in the states, were reportedly up a surprise 3% to $10.6 billion, sales on its digital equivalent, the so-called Cyber Monday, spiked 15% to $846 million according to comScore. ...

Malta Postal ISV Exports.
December 15, 2008... Ascent Software, the five-year-old Malta-based expert at automating small postal operations used by Maltapost and Guernsey Post, a Microsoft Gold partner, has reportedly won contracts at the postal services of both Barbados and the British...

Sweden Post Projects Internet Christmas.(Brief article)
December 15, 2008... Sweden Post expects two million Swedes to avoid the shops and buy Christmas presents over the Internet and by mail order. The number represents 26% of the population over the age of 15, more than ever before. Given the economy it expects...

DHL Signs 10-Year Pact with British Airways.
December 15, 2008... German logistics and mailing company Deutsche Post AG said its DHL Exel Supply Chain unit has won a multimillion pound-a-year contract from British Airways PLC to handle in-flight services for short haul and domestic flights from Heathrow. ...

Mauritius To Implement Post Code System.(Brief article)
December 15, 2008... Mauritius, the island nation off the coast of the African continent in the southwest Indian Ocean about 560 miles east of Madagascar, currently has no postal code system implemented but the Mauritius Post is planning to introduce one. A...

Windows Book Supports USPS Express Mail Service.
December 15, 2008... Window Book's Postal Package Partner shipping software now supports USPS Express Mail Open and Distribute for expedited overnight service. Window Book says it's vital for time-sensitive offers such as coupons, advertisements and other...

Neopost Holds to its Guidance.
December 15, 2008... Pitney Bowes' French rival Neopost posted Q3 sales up 3.8% to $280 million and stuck to its targets for 2008 and 2009. Ignoring currency fluctuations, it expects to grow at least 6% this year with an operating margin increase of 0.5%. It's...

Microsoft Picks Yahoo Geek To Run Google Counter-Offensive.
December 15, 2008... The job of running Microsoft's flagging Google counter-offensive - which has lain like a fallow field since Kevin Johnson left the company in July to become CEO of Juniper Networks, having been foiled in buying Yahoo - has been filled. As...

A Hobbled Sun Limps to the RIA Starting Gate.
December 15, 2008... It's a wonder it has the entry fee, but Sun showed up for the RIA race against Adobe's Flex, Flash and AIR and Microsoft's Silverlight - and for that matter the open source AJAX - riding JavaFX 1.0. According to Sun it's one of the most...

Amazon SimpleDB Hits Public Beta.
December 15, 2008... After spending a year in private beta, Amazon's SimpleDB has been pushed into what the company calls "unlimited public beta." Any developer or business can now sign up and start using the web service. As a come-on, for the next six months...

AMD's Quarter Sours Like Curdled Milk.
December 15, 2008... AMD sent out a short sharp message saying that the way things are going it expects revenues from continuing operations this quarter to be ~25% lower than they were last quarter and that was only $1.585 billion. It had previously thought...

IBM Takes New Tack To Push Microsoft Off the Desktop.
December 15, 2008... IBM is taking another shot at blowing Microsoft off the desktop and this time it's got the foul economic winds at its back. In the name of cost cutting, IBM is proposing that companies virtualize their desktops and turn them into thin...

PC Growth To Drop to Turtle Speed: IDC.
December 15, 2008... IDC took another look at its 2009 PC forecast and in view of economic realities dropped its worldwide unit growth rate prediction from 13.7% (which is what it said in Q2) to 3.8% and said the value of the PCs that do ship will decline by 5.3%....

Don't Look Back! The Server Landscape's Ugly.
December 15, 2008... Worldwide server shipments might have been up 4.4% to 2.3 million units in the September quarter but revenues were down 5.4% to $12.7 billion according to Gartner. IDC's numbers aren't all that different. It hasn't been this bad since 2002...

VMware Revamps its Virtual Desktop Widgetry.
December 15, 2008... VMware, the struggling virtualization leader, has, as expected, put View 3 on the market to do battle with Citrix' XenApp and XenDesktop widgetry. It's supposed to be a big advance in virtual desktop computing, described by the company as...

Novell Reminds Folks It Bought PlateSpin.
December 15, 2008... Novell is repositioning the virtualization widgetry that it bought for $205 million this spring when it bought PlateSpin and now claims to be the only kid on the block who can support 32- and 64-bit Windows and Linux servers, as well as all the...

Intel to EC: 'We Left Our Kid Gloves Home'.
December 15, 2008... Thanks to a sketchy notice in the Official Journal of the European Union we now know a tad more about why Intel has taken the European Commission to court. Seems Intel is accusing the EC of making it the butt of a "discriminatory and...

Alleged Software Pirate Accuses Microsoft of Antitrust.
December 15, 2008... A dealer in Holland that Microsoft sued in May for copyright infringement has complained to the European Commission that Microsoft charges anywhere from 30%-50% more for its software in Europe than in does in the US - except Vista which is only...

Intel & Hitachi Cut SSD Joint Venture.
December 15, 2008... Intel has cut a joint venture with Hitachi to make solid state drives (SSDs) for servers, high-end workstations and storage - not the consumer goods where such pricey widgetry is usually found these days. Their first products, branded and...

Moonlight Beta Out.
December 15, 2008... The promised beta release of Moonlight 1.0, the Linux implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight widgetry, has finally wended its way out. Moonlight is of course the open source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight and should give...

It's Official. We're in a Recession.
December 15, 2008... The Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a private non-profit research organization that determines such things based on broad and more precise measurements than most, said that the US is in a recession...

Googling the Cabinet?(Brief article)
December 15, 2008... Newsweek - which apparently sees the Obama cabinet amounting to a lot of big names with little experience - is floating the idea that the president-elect might make Dan Reicher, Google's director of climate change and energy initiatives, energy...

IDC Predicts Fluffy Clouds.(Brief article)
December 15, 2008... IDC figures that clouds services - that's the consumer and business products, services and solutions delivered via the cloud - is "crossing the chasm" and "entering a period of widespread adoption." It reckons that over the next five years...

Google & the Razor's Edge.
December 15, 2008... Google is more like Microsoft than it would admit. Not only is it regarded as a monopoly by the US government, it likes dangling its toes over the crevasse. Sandy Litvack, the guy that the Justice Department hired to build an antitrust...

Lack of Demand Forces FedEx To Shear its Outlook.
December 22, 2008... FedEx expects to report better-than-expected results for the November quarter, but ripped up its fiscal 2009 projections. Fuel prices might have plunged but so has the US economy, it said. FedEx figures it earned $1.58 a share its last...

NetPosti To Traffic in Junk Mail.
December 22, 2008... It looks like NetPosti, the "spam-free" e-mail service that Itella says isn't an e-mail service but rather an "online transaction service" commonly used for bills, banking, pay slips, prescriptions, investments and official forms, will also be...

Intermec Releases RFID Reader Kit for Microsoft BizTalk RFID Mobile.
December 22, 2008... Intermec has released a device deployment kit that supports Microsoft BizTalk RFID Mobile, making mobile RFID solutions easier for customers and partners to develop, deploy and manage. The deployment kit for BizTalk RFID Mobile extends...

Royal Mail To Upgrade its SAP HP Systems.
December 22, 2008... Royal Mail wants to upgrade its SAP-based HR system. Apparently it will take three years to consolidate and integrate its legacy payroll and admin systems, custom point systems, spreadsheets and web-based recruitment into a single SAP ERP...

DHL Looks East.
December 22, 2008... In retreat from its failure in the US, DHL is looking east. Deutsche Post CEO Frank Appel told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that the express unit would buy small companies in Asia. It expects to get them on the cheap because of the...

PosteMobile Brags.
December 22, 2008... PosteMobile, the year-long wireless service joint venture between Poste Italiane and Vodafone Italia, says it's hit 670,000 customers and that, despite the economic crisis, it figures to reach two million customers by 2011. Besides its...

Spain's Virtual Post Office Expands.
December 22, 2008... The Spanish Post is offering a new service through its Virtual Post Office (www.correos.es). It can now be used for Postal Express and will spew out the labels, bar codes and postage needed to send urgent packages and documents, saving users a...

Google Seeks To Overcome the Browser's Limitations.
December 22, 2008... Oh, look. Google's found another way to annoy the...to annoy Microsoft. This one's called Native Client, a shiny new open source R&D project aimed at running fast x86 native code in web applications. It's another way of going for the...

Google Chrome Leaves Beta.
December 22, 2008... Google just did a very un-Googley thing. It pushed Chrome out of the beta nest. Chrome's only been in beta since September 2, something like a hundred days. And Google is famous for keeping widgetry in beta until the beta label turns...

Amazon's Cloud Covers Europe.
December 22, 2008... Betcha IBM is worried that Amazon is gonna wind up owning the cloud. Betcha other companies are worried about that too. Amazon has extended EC2, its Elastic Compute Cloud, to Europe. European developers and businesses can now run their...

Salesforce.com & Google Clouds Get Cozier.(Salesforce.com Inc. has expanded its alliance with Google Inc.)
December 22, 2008... Salesforce.com, which used to be just a chi-chi SaaS house until it realized that identifying itself with cloud computing would make it even more fashionable, has expanded its alliance with Google. It's come up with Force.com for Google App...

HP Changes its Plans for EDS.
December 22, 2008... As HP chows down on EDS and digests it, EDS CEO Ron Rittenmeyer said he's had enough and is going to bail at the end of the year. Originally EDS was supposed to be a free-standing HP subsidiary with Rittenmeyer reporting to HP CEO Mark...

Yahoo Stockholder Has Visions of Sugarplums.
December 22, 2008... As Yahoo went around handing out ~1,500 pink slips and culling products and services, California hedge fund Ivory Investment Management LP, which owns ~1.5% of Yahoo and probably wishes it didn't, started pushing the company to do a search...

Adobe & Spring Tie Up To Advance Java RIAs.
December 22, 2008... Adobe and SpringSource say they're working on integrating Adobe Flash and the SpringSource platform to simplify the development and deployment of rich Internet Java apps. They're supposed to make it easy for Java developers to create...

VMWare & HP Plan Integration.
December 22, 2008... VMware wants to tie up with all the major software managers and has started with HP. The pair already has a relationship but now the two are going to integrate HP's Business Technology Optimization (BTO) software with VMware vCenter Lab...

AMD's Life Preserver Just Got Smaller.
December 22, 2008... Since it signed its long-in-making "asset lite" deal with the sheikdom of Abu Dhabi on October 6, AMD has cut its Q4 revenue expectations from flat to down 25%, next year's prospects ain't looking particularly great, and its stock is now worth...

IBM Pushes into Cloud Conferencing.
December 22, 2008... IBM is pushing its upgraded Lotus Sametime Unyte 8.2 as a global cloud service for web conferencing up against Cisco's WebEx and Microsoft's Office Live Meeting. It's tied up with InterCall, the conference call biggie, for distribution,...

Android Gets More Converts.
December 22, 2008... The Android-loving Open Handset Alliance says it's added 14 more members, bringing its total to 47 companies. Of course it's only produced one phone so far, the iPhone's leagues ahead and the crummy economy is expected to hurt even cell...

Microsoft Dabbles in Open Source.
December 22, 2008... Microsoft has started an open source blogging engine dubbed Oxite, targeted initially at developers who want to learn ASP.NET MVC. Microsoft allows that the community could push it out for consumers. The Oxite FAQ asks why we need another...

It's Dell & EMC for Another Five Years.
December 22, 2008... Dell and EMC have extended their alliance through 2013. And Dell's gonna pick up EMC's four-month-old Celerra NX4 storage system. That's the unified storage solution that consolidates NAS, iSCSI and Fibre Channel technologies on one platform....