ePostal News articles from February 2006

ePostal News archives from February 2006

PRC claims oversight over USPS e-initiatives.
February 6, 2006... The president-appointed, congressionally mandated Postal Rate Commission (PRC) has been saying for some time now that postal services include all of the USPS' recent e-flyers and that--if they're postal services--then it has the right to review...

Western Union to spin out of First Data.
February 6, 2006... First Data Corporation is going to spin off Western Union and its huge money-transfer business into a publicly traded company owned immediately by First Data shareholders later this year. The move is to make up for First Data's overall poor...

SingPost sells Microsoft Office software.
February 6, 2006... Singapore Post is selling cut-rate copies of Microsoft Office Professional Edition to students under a special subsidy. SingPost puts the local recommended list price of the software at $509. It's selling it for $80 to Ministry of Education...

UK researcher claims RFID will soar.
February 6, 2006... IDTechEx, the UK-based market research specializing in RFID, says the market will be worth $2.71 billion this year and $12.35 billion by 2010. It reckons that 600 million tags were sold last year and that 1.3 billion tags will be sold this...

Russian Post to offer Western Union's Money Transfer Service.(Brief article)
February 6, 2006... Western Union subsidiary Western Union MT East has cut a deal with Russian national postal operator Federal State Unitary Enterprise, known as "Russian Post," to provide international money transfer services. Russian Post has one of the largest...

USPS wants its forms converted.
February 6, 2006... The US Postal Service wants to turn its automated forms into smart documents that validate data, do calculations and accept digital signatures. It's looking for a vendor that will convert its old forms and create new ones using Adobe...

Posta Uganda gets web site.
February 6, 2006... Posta Uganda has gotten itself a new interactive web site that offers customers a two-way communication link. Users of registered mail services will be able to track and trace letters or parcels and make general inquiries online. Stamps will...

Slovak Post Office eyes e-services.
February 6, 2006... Slovenska posta (SP), the Slovak Post Office, will offer a brace of electronic services starting in July, according to a press report in The Slovak Spectator. The services are supposed to include the electronic administration of packages,...

IBM helps Swiss Post read foreign addresses.
February 6, 2006... The Swiss Post has become the subject of an IBM case study. IBM Global Services and IBM Research ran up a state-of-the-art "smart" scanning system for the Swiss ParcelPost to improve the handling of foreign addresses and minimize the costly...

India Post introduces iMO.(instant money order)(Brief article)
February 6, 2006... India Post is experimenting with the money order business promising that its instant money order iMO will arrive in the other party's hands in a half-hour. The money can go to his house or be collected at the post office. Initially the new...

Microsoft plays the source code card.
February 6, 2006... Microsoft has brought a new deck of cards into the game with the European Commission. It said that since it couldn't produce any documentation that would satisfy the EC, it would make the source code behind the Windows Server protocols...

HP remedies the heat crisis.
February 6, 2006... HP has come up with what it somewhat reluctantly calls a "universal" solution to the heat crisis. Reluctantly because it would like to see it applied to its servers, but as kind of an afterthought it tells you that it can be used with...

Apple gets free tickets to Disneyland.
February 6, 2006... You have of course heard that Disney is buying Pixar for the premium price of $7.4 billion in stock, making Steve Jobs Disney's largest stockholder and handing him a wider canvas with which to play media power broker. He will be named to the...

Microsoft continues to mint money.
February 6, 2006... In the December quarter, Microsoft made $3.65 billion or 34 cents a share, up 5% year-over-year, on revenues of $11.84 billion, up 9%, more than the Great Money Machine ever sold in a single quarter before, but a tad shy of the company-led...

Whither thou goest, Stevie boy.
February 6, 2006... Microsoft is developing an iPod-like digital media device that would probably play music, videos and games, according to BusinessWeek, might carry the Xbox brand and could mean a change in strategy. Microsoft has been putting its software on an...

AMD makes Meyer president & COO.
February 6, 2006... AMD CEO and chairman Hector Ruiz has turned over his presidential title to Dirk Meyer, the head of the company's "on-a-roll" CPU operation, who was also named chief operating officer, suggesting a succession plan has been put in place. ...

EMC to sell the world's biggest array.
February 6, 2006... EMC has introduced the world's biggest storage array along with new file system software and new NAS virtualization capabilities in the name of making information lifecycle management (ILM) more pervasive. EMC's flagship Symmetrix DMX-3...

Supremes refuse Blackberry appeal.
February 6, 2006... The US Supreme Court has refused to hear Research In Motion's appeal to save it from being outlawed for patent infringement by an unfriendly lower court. The Supremes were asked to decide if US patent law applies to a technology that's...

SAP joins Itanium club.
February 6, 2006... SAP has joined the Itanium Solution Alliance booster club. It's apparently pledged to push Itanium into the public sector and deliver ERP solutions on the thing. It's been working with Intel to optimize mySAP and NetWeaver on the chip running...

Think ya need ILM, do ya.(Information Lifecycle Management)(Brief article)
February 6, 2006... 3 Par's got a way to eliminate the expense and complexity of Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) and still cost-optimize storage. The widgetry is called Utility Data Lifecycle Management (DLM) and it's supposed to consolidate the whole...

IBM open sources UIMA.
February 6, 2006... IBM is open sourcing its Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) and has put the source code on SourceForge. Later this year, it intends to move this project to a full open source community development model. The company...

Linux won't be GPL3'd.
February 6, 2006... Linus Torvald says Linux won't be licensed under GPLv3, the recently released proposed update of the famous Free Software Foundation-created license, evidently because a new non-fraternization clause forbids GPL3 software from hooking up with...

Well, so much for that idea.(Lloyd's of London has spend 70 million pounds sterling to get kinnect)(Brief article)
February 6, 2006... Remember the Paperless Office? Well, Lloyd's of London, which has spend 70 million pounds sterling over the last five year trying to get Kinnect, a paperless trading platform, off the ground, has finally called it quits and pulled the plug...

The new Manhattan Project.(Sun, Google and Lenovo are kicking in and funding a new multi year)(Brief article)
February 6, 2006... Sun, Google and Lenovo are kicking in and funding a new multi-year, multimillion-dollar Harvard-Oxford University project to clean up the Internet called StopBadware.org. The project's Oxford-supplied co-director calls it a "non-profit sort of...

Pitney Bowes buys UK software house; makes run at Escher.
February 13, 2006... Pitney Bowes has signed a definitive agreement to acquire 13-year-old UK-based Emtex Ltd for roughly $41 million. Emtex' output management software and services allow large-volume mailers to simplify document production and centrally manage...

AOL, Yahoo to E-mailers: 'buy a stamp'.(Internet Services)(Brief article)
February 13, 2006... Volume e-mailers are going to have to buy the digital equivalent of a postage stamp as a form of certified e-mail and pay anywhere from a quarter of a penny to a whole penny for it, a pricey toll, if they want their e-mail to AOL and Yahoo...

Salesforce beats out SAP at Pan Nordic.
February 13, 2006... Salesforce.com, the hot new on-demand CRM house, is bragging that Pan Nordic Logistics (PNL) cut its call-handling time by 36% using its Service & Support and Salesforce SFA software. Salesforce says Pan Nordic snubbed mySAP CRM, despite...

DOD could turn to private companies to deliver its mail.
February 13, 2006... In response to a 2004 request by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfield to study the issue, the Defense Business Board quietly concluded in December that the Defense Department should outsource military mail and there are plans afoot to do so...

Window book kicks off counter-UPS, FedEx, DHL system.
February 13, 2006... Window Book Inc, the postal automation house, has launched Your First Priority System, a shipping and fulfillment solution for mailing lightweight items and documents targeted at eBay auction and Yahoo Store online sellers. The widgetry...

Endicia upgrades its Mac software.
February 13, 2006... Endicia, the Internet postage arm of Envelope Manager Software, has launched its second-generation customized PictureItPostage software for the Mac, a Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger"-only application. The company calls it a "true Mac experience." ...

RFID start-up tops up a round.
February 13, 2006... Cisco and Nicholas Negroponte, the founding chairman of MIT's Media Laboratory--he of the One Laptop per Child initiative--were part of a $6 million add-on to the now $21 million A round that leading RFID start-up, ThingMagic, has raised since...

Firstlogic donates its software to the UN.
February 13, 2006... Firstlogic is contributing its data quality software to the United Nations under an arrangement with the UN Development Programme (UNDP), the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) and the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). ...

The telegram: requiescat in pace.
February 13, 2006... Western Union, which came into being with the advent of the telegram, has sent its very last one. The service was pulled on January 27, killed by affordable long-distance phone calls, faxes and no-cost e-mail, none of which can ever replace the...

Is Microsoft's monopoly at risk?
February 13, 2006... When Microsoft's chief counsel tells you it's not important--followed by Bill Gates going around saying it's not important--your deflector shields light up and you just know it's important. Well, Microsoft is trying to divert attention--at...

IBM kicks off Blade.org.
February 13, 2006... IBM is good to go with its next-generation BladeCenter, which is why why HP has the knives out claiming Blue's got power and cooling problems and that the box isn't totally backward-compatible with existing blades. Anyway IBM is trying to...

SAP moves on Salesforce.com turf.
February 13, 2006... SAP, as it was bound to do, has lit out after Salesforce.com and Siebel, soon to be an Oracle satellite, with on-demand web-based CRM software sold by subscription. IBM will do the hosting and help SAP sell it. SAP says it's targeting...

Microsoft tickles mid-market Server Pack.
February 13, 2006... Microsoft Wednesday made Windows Server 2003 R2, its first major Server upgrade in, well, it'll be three years, generally available. It's an update to Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1. There's also a Server Pack 2 for the Internet...

Google stumbles; suffers feet-of-clay moment.
February 13, 2006... The boys in Redmond must have gone out and lifted a few jars in celebration of the precipitous 20% after-hours plunge that Google's stock took when it released its Q4 numbers. Google lost $30 billion in market cap or 50 bucks a share, and...

HP taps Vignette CEO to run software.
February 13, 2006... HP has tapped Vignette CEO Thomas Hogan to replace the recently resigned friend-of-Carly Nora Denzel as head of its problematic software operation, reporting to Ann Livermore, head of the Technology Solutions Group. Before Vignette, Hogan did...

Microsoft edits code for court.
February 13, 2006... Since last month Microsoft has been telling customers that new deployments of Office Professional 2003 and Access 2003 have to install Office SP2 and new deployments of Office XP Professional and Access 2002 have to apply a special patch. ...

Microsoft releases 'attack-repelling' IE7 beta.
February 13, 2006... Microsoft has released the first generally available Internet Explorer 7 beta along with Windows RSS Platform, a set of APIs so developers can create RSS-enabled programs. It told consumers to wait for the next go-round in a couple of...

IBM frees low-end version of DB2.
February 13, 2006... Without much fanfare, IBM has gone down the free database road already paved by Oracle and Microsoft and, well, its own Cloudscape--not to mention the open source crowd--and has produced a little Linux and Windows-based number called DB...

Hark, are those war drums?(Google develops its operating system)(Brief article)
February 13, 2006... Google is crafting its own desktop Linux distribution, according to the Register. It says that Google has confirmed that it's working on a desktop Linux project called Goobuntu based on the Debian-Gnome desktop Ubuntu pushed by Canonical...

Something tells me Microsoft won't be contributing to Mitt Romney's presidential campaign.
February 13, 2006... The Commonwealth of Massachusetts has named Louis Gutierrez, an open standards kind of guy who is presently the University of Massachusetts Medical School's chief technology strategist, to be its new CIO and wage the widely watched, potentially...

Red Hat to run one laptop per child box.
February 13, 2006... Well, it looks like Red Hat's going to be the Linux operating system in Nicholas Negroponte's still-prototype UN-backed $100-a-box One Laptop per Child (OLPC) initiative. Reportedly Negroponte, the head of MIT's Media Lab, snubbed both...

IBM & friends push AJAX into open source.
February 13, 2006... IBM, Google, Mozilla Corporation, Novell, Red Hat. Oracle, Yahoo, Zend, BEA, Borland and some other like-minded folk have created an open source project for AJAX, a technology of the moment. They say it's to popularize the stuff and promote its...

The real VS Team due.
February 13, 2006... Microsoft is supposed to ship the real Visual Studio Team System next month. The widgetry is currently available only under one of those GoLive licenses that lets users deploy the stuff but without support.

Acrobat 8 scheduled.
February 13, 2006... Seems we should expect Acrobat 8 in Adobe's November quarter. Maybe, if Adobe watchers are right, in September. With its acquisition of Macromedia it's got five new products in the works that it's demo'd that neither company could reportedly...

VT no longer 'virtual'.
February 13, 2006... Intel is turning on the Virtualization Technology (VT) in the Paxville MP server chip that's been shipping since November. It's finally got the firmware that'll wake it up. Meanwhile, it appears that Montecito, the next-generation Itanium...

Blackcomb rechristened.(Brief article)
February 13, 2006... CNET says it persuaded Microsoft to tell it Vienna is now the new codename Blackcomb and little else about Vista's successor, which may inherit the WinFS file storage stuff yanked out of Vista. Meanwhile Vista's second beta looks like it's...

Dell's sure gonna look cute in a sari.(call center in India)(Brief article)
February 13, 2006... Dell said that it was going to put a fourth call center in India as well as look for a site for a manufacturing plant. Dell currently has 10,000 employees in India, going to 15,000 in the next couple of years. It's going to double its 300...

Microsoft lab to make things.
February 13, 2006... Microsoft is going to set up a new product-oriented research lab called Microsoft Live Labs dedicated to Internet technology, a joint venture so to speak between MSN and Microsoft Research. The name recalls Microsoft's software-as-services...

Russia post to install broadband satellite network.
February 20, 2006... Siberia is after all, well, Siberia, the byword for remote and frigid, and trying to service the place obviously presents Russia Post with some unique hurdles. In fact, to no one's surprise Russia Post says that standard terrestrial...

Postcomm wants PAF reform.
February 20, 2006... Postcomm, the UK postal regulator, says that the Royal Mail's Postcode Address File (PAF), the electronic database containing every address in the UK, should be more widely available and managed by a separate business unit in Royal Mail. ...

DHL launches offline software kit.
February 20, 2006... DHL has launched a software shipping solution called EasyShip Professional that's aimed at SMEs. It automates the entire shipping process for customers who prefer to use their own computer hardware and work offline, according to VP of...

USPS to develop new sorting technology.
February 20, 2006... The USPS board of governors has redirected funds into developing and testing a Flats Sequencing System that will allow the sequencing of larger mail pieces in delivery point order. The agency failed to mention how much it would cost. The...

Half way through test, Stamps.com has sold 10 PhotoStamps.
February 20, 2006... Stamps.com, one of the companies testing customized stamps in the US, posted its fourth-quarter results, which of course covered the holidays, and said that it shipped roughly 345,000 sheets of what it calls PhotoStamps--about seven million...

VeriSign fraud detection service debuts.
February 20, 2006... VeriSign has kicked off a Fraud Detection Service meant to protect against online identity theft through behavioral patterns as opposed to the increasingly discredited user names and passwords, especially for high-risk transactions such as...

Hungary post on blacklists.
February 20, 2006... Hungary has developed a bad reputation with Internet shippers like Amazon.com, according to the Hungarian paper Magyar Hirlap, because too many deliveries sent through the Hungarian post office Magyar Posta reportedly never reach their...

You have mail.(Qatar's Q-Post is going to start e-mailing or notifying customers through their cell phones that they have mail)
February 20, 2006... Qatar's Q-Post is reportedly going to start e-mailing or notifying customers through their cell phones that they have mail. Customers will also be able to access an online facility to see if they have mail in their mailbox. According to Q-Post...

Western Union extends its reach in Chile.(Brief article)
February 20, 2006... Western Union has tied up with Chilexpress, one of Chile's largest domestic couriers, to launch domestic money transfer services. Chilexpress operates upwards of 175 locations and has offered Western Union's international money orders for the...

Oracle reportedly wants JBoss.(Brief article)
February 20, 2006... The biggest widely known secret turns out to be that Oracle is looking at buying JBoss and that it's been doing the due diligence and that the term sheet values the open source company at a whopping $400 million--a lot of bread for a startup...

Yoo-hoo, Xen, VMware puts out free server.
February 20, 2006... VMware is going to try accelerating mainstream virtualization adoption--not to mention deflecting its open source competitor Xen--with a free new entry-level hosted VMware Server for Linux and Windows. It's got a beta at...

The XenSource shuffle.(Brief article)
February 20, 2006... The Mercury News noticed that privately held virtualization house XenSource, the would-be VMware killer with the $23.5 million from Kleiner Perkins, Sevin Rosen, Accel and NEA, recently shuffled its management team and cut headcount. The...

Microsoft pushes into Symantec turf.
February 20, 2006... Microsoft intends to skip into Symantec-McAfee turf and release its unbundled consumer security solution Windows OneCare Live in June and charge $49.95 a year for a subscription--the new and future metaphor--a price that covers three PCs. ...

EC to Microsoft: 'no' as in 'no'.
February 20, 2006... The European Commission has told Microsoft that it can't have its file, can't see what the independent monitor has been telling the EC about Microsoft's so-called protocol documentation and, no, it can't have another extension before it answers...

Oracle sucks up Siebel, spits out people.
February 20, 2006... Now that it's sucked up Siebel, Oracle is going to terminate 2,000 people to polish up its P&L, confirming what Wall Street has been saying for months. The jettisoned will include both Oracle and Siebel folk like the company did when it...

Germany puts dent in 'pre-owned' software.
February 20, 2006... The District Court of Munich said dealing in so-called "used" software--or reselling software licenses to third parties--is illegal when it found usedSoft GmbH's practice of selling "used" software licenses to third parties infringed on Oracle...

AMD wants government to stop saying Intel.
February 20, 2006... AMD is going to try to turn the tap on the government contracts that flow to Intel as a matter of course and complain to the powers that be in a scratchy voice that sounds like chalk grating on a blackboard that most agencies are breaking the...

Mandriva loses money.(Brief article)
February 20, 2006... Mandriva lost 40,000 euros net, 1.1 million euros on an operating basis in its 2004/05 fiscal year. It cleared 1.39 million euros net in 2003/04. Consolidated sales were up 5.2% to 5.45 million euros while Mandriva's operating revenue was...

Google toys with world order.
February 20, 2006... You have of course heard that Google, in Microsoft fashion, has apparently bought the right to have its software preinstalled on, oh, maybe, 100 million Dell computers--for something approaching a billion dollars over three years--enough money...

CIOs cautious: Merrill.
February 20, 2006... Having taken another survey, Merrill Lynch says CIOs are pulling in their horns on spending this year. It found the percentage of CIOs indicating an increase in IT spending has declined, indicating caution. It also found an incremental number...

French cops toss Microsoft.
February 20, 2006... France's gendarmes are tossing out Microsoft's browser in favor of Firefox and Thunderbird. That's 70,000 desktops. The cops are already moving from Office to OpenOffice. Twenty percent of Europe has reportedly moved to Firefox.