ePostal News articles from February 2009

ePostal News archives from February 2009

Profits Complicate Royal Mail's Sell-Off Plans.
February 2, 2009... The Royal Mail has reportedly set its cap on hiring long-time Barclays investment banker Donald Brydon, now the chairman of both the Smiths Group, an engineering company, and the London Metal Exchange, to replace its own chairman Allan...

USPS Names New CFO, Realigns Sales.
February 2, 2009... The USPS Monday announced that its incumbent CFO H. Glen Walker will be switching jobs and will be replaced come February 2 by outside import Joseph Corbett, who's joining the agency at what may be the worst time in its history. Rumors now...

Ex-Deutsche Post CEO Dodges Jail.
February 2, 2009... Disgraced former Deutsche Post CEO, Klaus Zumwinkel, forced to resign his post a year ago after he was arrested, a scene that was captured on TV, was convinced of being a tax cheat Monday by a German court. He drew a two-year suspended...

Deutsche Post Exceeding Reduced Guidance.(Financial report)(Brief article)
February 2, 2009... Deutsche Post has pre-announced and said its operating profits for 2008 exceeded its reduced guidance of 2.4 billion euros ($3.18 billion) before taxes and interest but it can't project what this year will look like before the end of this...

Lenovo Gets Dibs on China Post.
February 2, 2009... Lenovo has cut a long-term strategic deal that will give it first crack at supplying the China Post's computer and information services demands. In return Lenovo is supposed favor the China Post as its shipper. The deal also involves some...

Cuban & Russian Posts Cozy Up.
February 2, 2009... Cuba sent representatives from its Ministry of Informatics and Communications to meet with the Russian Post to sign a memorandum of cooperation to improve the exchange of mail and electronic money transfers between the two countries.

DHL CFO To Push On to Consumer Electronics Chain.
February 2, 2009... John Allan, once the boss of Exel, is going to be named chairman of DSG International PLC, the British-based consumer electronics retailer in September after be steps down as CFO of Deutsche Post World Net in June. Deutsche Post bought the...

Pitney Sticks to its Pre-Digital Knitting.
February 2, 2009... Pitney Bowes, in its role as mail consolidator and acting as though the world wasn't going digital, is opening new international mail services facilities in both the UK and California. The sites will offer Pitney's international mail and...

EC Asked To Nail IBM for Monopoly Maintenance.
February 2, 2009... T3 Technologies Inc, once the world's second-largest IBM mainframe systems integrator, has filed a formal 500-page antitrust complaint with the European Commission charging IBM with shutting it out of the market. T3, which sued IBM in New...

Intel Starts Shutting Down Manufacturing.
February 2, 2009... With demand sucking wind and an inventory stockpile still to sell, Intel is going to shutter five manufacturing operations - two assembly test facilities in Malaysia and one in the Philippines as well as a 200mm wafer fabrication plant in...

Microsoft Cuts 5,000 Jobs.
February 2, 2009... In a surprise move Microsoft jumped the gun and posted its calendar Q4 results before the stock market opened rather than wait until after the market closed as scheduled. Bad news is evidently better eaten for breakfast. The economy is...

Citrix Sets Out To Change Desktop Economics.
February 2, 2009... Citrix claims that CIOs want to stop supplying their companies' employees with computers and make it a "bring-your-own" affair so they can shed the cost of the hardware and the headaches of support. And Citrix says that its newfangled...

AMD Revenues Thin, Losses Continue.
February 2, 2009... Beset now by industry-wide lack of demand among its other problems, AMD lost $1.42 billion net, $2.34 a share, in Q4, less than the $1.77 billion loss it had the year before, but then its revenues of $1.162 billion were also down 33%...

Symantec CEO Bruited for Commerce Secretary.
February 2, 2009... The name of John W Thompson, the CEO of Symantec, is said to be on a short list to become secretary of commerce in the new Obama administration. And Reuters, quoting a Symantec spokesman, says he's talked to the Obama transition team. The...

Jobs May Need a New Liver.(Brief article)
February 2, 2009... Bloomberg says that the SEC is reviewing Apple's disclosures about the health of its CEO Steve Jobs "to ensure investors weren't misled." Great, Apple has little credibility and the SEC is trying to redeem its own sunken reputation. ...

Apple Suffers Recession Disconnect, Posts Record Quarter.(Financial report)(Brief article)
February 2, 2009... Despite the recession and consumer fears, Apple posted record numbers for the fourth calendar quarter, surpassing $10 billion in revenues for the first time in its life, hitting $10.17 billion, up 5.8%, on earning of $1.6 billion, or $1.78 a...

Microsoft Betas MED-V.
February 2, 2009... Microsoft has beta'd what it calls Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V) 1.0, derived from its acquisition of Kidaro, the virtualization house. IT managers are supposed to be able to create and manage virtual XP and Windows...

Ex-Satyam CEO Accused of Stealing the Wages of Phantom Staffers.
February 2, 2009... The founder of Satyam Computer Services Ltd, Ramalinga Raju, has been accused of inflating the number of people who work for the big Indian outsourcer by 13,000 to siphon off their phony wages. The company is supposed to have 53,000 people,...

Google Shrugs Off Recession.
February 2, 2009... Microsoft has another reason to eat its liver. Google did fine in the fourth quarter. It did better than fine. Like Apple and IBM, it beat estimates in a lousy environment. According to CEO Eric Schmidt, "Search query growth was...

Zuora Seeks Cloud's Silver Lining.
February 2, 2009... Zuora, the Marc Benioff-backed on-demand billing and payments start-up, has announced what it calls the Z-Commerce Platform, a development platform dedicated to monetizing cloud computing services. Zuora CEO Tien Tzuo describes the widgetry...

Microsoft Contributes Code to Apache.
February 2, 2009... Microsoft has kicked in software code to the great Apache open source project, specifically its Project Stonehenge, which is bent on building sample applications using Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Stonehenge wants to inculcate best...

Cisco To Harness VMware To Enter Server Biz: NY Times.
February 2, 2009... Cisco is going into the server business, according to a story in the New York Times. The virtualization-only blade server that others say is code named California will be bundled with Cisco networking hardware and VMware virtualization....

Ballmer, Bostock & Bewkes Meet.
February 2, 2009... Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock and Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes met in New York, according to reports, after Yahoo's new CEO Carol Bartz coyly expressed reservations about selling off Yahoo's search to Microsoft. Time...

USPS Contemplates Cutting Deliveries.
February 9, 2009... The head of the United States Postal Service John Potter, who now admits that the agency could be looking at a $6 billion loss or more (note he said "or more") this fiscal year, asked Congress last Wednesday for the authority to cut America's...

Italian Post To Peddle USB Stick.
February 9, 2009... Working with Adobe, Postecom, the technology arm of Poste Italiane, has come up with a USB stick called a PosteKey that will let users access the post office's Postecert online services, access their data, digitally sign or encrypt files and...

CVC Swaps Danish Post Shares for Belgian.
February 9, 2009... CVC Capital Partners, the private equity house that may make a bid for a piece of the UK's Royal Mail, said Monday that it's selling its 22% stake in Post Danmark and taking a 49.9% piece of Belgium's De Post-La Poste. CVC said it'll be...

Pitney Bowes Talking the Digital Talk.
February 9, 2009... In a move that borrows from the Earth Class Mail playbook, Pitney Bowes Management Services Inc (PBMS) is now pushing what it calls Virtual Mail Management Solutions. It's proposing to use its existing dMail Digital Mail Solution and other...

La Poste Goes with Open Source.
February 9, 2009... France's La Poste is going to rip out whatever it is its courier unit has been using for its ERP system and go with the open source Compiere widgetry to manage the sales, procurement, reporting and control of about 2,500 facilities. The...

FedEx Updates Web Tracking Tools.
February 9, 2009... FedEx, the company that invented tracking, has launched new state-of-the-art real-time tracking technologies that work via web, desktop or mobile devices. The widgetry is available globally in 26 languages and includes a shipment...

T-Systems Joins DHL Innovation Initiative.
February 9, 2009... T-Systems, the Deutsche Telekom unit, has joined the DHL Innovation Initiative of Deutsche Post World Net, making it the fifth major global company to throw in with the research network. The deal between T-Systems and DHL - aimed at making...

Authentidate-Parascript Merger Terminated.(Brief article)
February 9, 2009... Authentidate, still the only licensed purveyor of USPS' Electronic Postmark (EPM) and, given its lousy track record with the technology, trying hard to becoming something else, says its would-be merger partner Parascript has pulled out of the...

DocuSign Creates 'Smart Envelopes'.
February 9, 2009... DocuSign, which peddles on-demand electronic signature and electronic contract execution solutions, has added new Professional and DocuSign Corporate Editions designed to create a scalable on-demand solution for businesses to replace the...

Striata Teams with Goodmail.
February 9, 2009... Striata, an electronic document delivery specialist, has added Goodmail's CertifiedEmail to its Secure eDocument Delivery solutions to enhance recipient trust in statements, bills, collection notices, policies and other high-volume,...

PB Renames Pitney Bowes Software.
February 9, 2009... Pitney Bowes' MapInfo and Group 1 Software are now functioning as a business unit called Pitney Bowes Business Insight. They used to be loosely bound together as Pitney Bowes Software, a name that evidently didn't capture their function....

Bahrain Launches Tracking Service.
February 9, 2009... The Bahrain Post has launched a letters and parcel tracking service through the Bahraini eGovernment Authority (eGA) national portal at www.bahrain.bh. Previously, customers had to call a hotline and ask for a customer service representative.

USPS Investigating Amazon.
February 9, 2009... Amazon has told the SEC that it's being investigated by the US Postal Service and the Postal Service Office of Inspector General for "compliance with Postal Service rules" but that's all it's saying.

Why the Biggest Antitrust Case Ever May Never Get to Court.
February 9, 2009... Wanna bet that Intel has found a way to get AMD to drop its cherished antitrust suit against the semiconductor giant - and that AMD handed Intel the six-gun to blow it away like in a Sam Peckinpah movie? It all revolves around AMD's...

Euro Court Tells Intel To Go Suck an Egg.
February 9, 2009... Intel has lost its unprecedented bid to get the European Commission to consider what Intel figures is exculpatory evidence that the agency refuses to seek in the AMD-leveraged antitrust action that the EC has brought against the semiconductor...

Symantec Gets the Cloud Bug.
February 9, 2009... Symantec is going with the flow about "liberating" users from the physical desktop and pushing them into the cloud. It's put out a beta of some newfangled GoEverywhere widgetry - complements of what it calls its incubator - that's designed...

Win7 Beta Availability Extended.
February 9, 2009... Late last Friday Microsoft extended the deadline for the public beta of its next-generation desktop operating system, Windows 7, perhaps because it hasn't hit its 2.5 million download bogie although it claims to have enough feedback to meet its...

GDrive: Where the Rubber Supposedly Meets the Road.
February 9, 2009... The chattering classes - both the blogosphere and the established press - are atwitter over the rumor - this particular one revived a few days ago by TG Daily - that Google is finally going to unveil its unconfirmed S3-like online storage...

VMware's Q4 Revenues, Earnings Up 25%.(Financial report)
February 9, 2009... Virtualization market leader VMware, which is fighting a two-front war against the recession and Microsoft, made 36 cents a share on revenues up 25% to $515 million in the fourth quarter, better than Wall Street thought it would. Estimates only...

Cloud Reaches Washington, D.C.
February 9, 2009... CSC and Terremark Worldwide, two old beltway bandits, have thrown in their lots together to offer cloud computing services to the US government. That means they'll approach federal agencies about buying their IT infrastructure requirements...

Bartz to Ballmer: 'Don't Hold Your Breath'.
February 9, 2009... Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, there all of eight days and already sounding a bit like her predecessor, the company's eminence grise, Jerry Yang, said Tuesday that "I didn't come here to sell the company." The occasion was her first post-earnings...

Gmail Inches Toward Offline Support.(Brief article)
February 9, 2009... Eighteen months or so after Google Gears debuted, a period of time scarred by several major Gmail outages, Google's cloud-accessible-only e-mail is finally getting invested with offline support. English-speaking US and UK Gmail users who...

Start-up To Commercialize Lucene Search.
February 9, 2009... Eighteen-month-old Lucid Imagination rose above the covering ground fog Tuesday to announce its existence as the first open source company to commercially support the Apache Lucene and Solr search technologies. The Java-based Lucene search...

Intel Said To Be Throwing SaaS Blanket Across Europe.
February 9, 2009... Intel is building a SaaS platform "that will soon blanket Europe," according to the financial blog Seeking Alpha. Intel reportedly confirmed that the widgetry involved its own Multi-Site Director along with managed services software from...

Well, That's the First Billion.(Brief article)
February 9, 2009... As of December there were over a billion Internet users in the world, according to comScore, complements of Asia-Pacific in general and China in particular. Asia-Pac accounts for 41% of this global audience, followed by Europe's 28%, North...

IBM Buys Outblaze Assets.
February 9, 2009... IBM is buying the strategic messaging service assets of Outblaze, the Hong Kong-based online messaging and collaboration service, for Bluehouse, now in open beta. Terms were not disclosed. Outblaze's hosted multilingual e-mail service...

Swiss Internet Postage To Be Cheaper than Traditional Stamps.
February 16, 2009... Come April 1 the Swiss Post is going hike its rates and in the process make WebStamp, its Internet postage, marginally cheaper than conventional stamps. It says selling stamps "over the counter has long since outstripped actual revenue."...

Royal Mail Unleashes a Tiger.
February 16, 2009... The UK's Royal Mail has started asking its staff, particularly back office staff, to take voluntary redundancy, switch to part-time work or move to another office because there's less mail to deliver and it wants to save 470 million pounds a...

USPS Loses $384m in Quarter.
February 16, 2009... The US Postal Service figures it lost $384 million in the December quarter. It was down 5.2 billion pieces of mail. The numbers are still preliminary but operating revenues are projected to be $19.1 billion, down 6.3% to $1.3 billion and...

French Post Goes for Online Postage.
February 16, 2009... The French Post has caught the online post bug. Folks can now use its new MonTimbrenLigne service to print postage for mail of any sort in any denomination at home or at work 24/7 directly onto an envelope or a sheet of labels in a few clicks....

Brazilian Post Pushes Online Contracts.(Brief article)
February 16, 2009... The Brazilian Post says that last year about $900 million worth of its contracts were processed electronically, something in the neighborhood of 3,000 transactions, to its benefit. It figures e-contracts broaden the opportunities for...

Bellwether Predicts Continued Nastiness.(United Postal Service's financial report)(Financial report)(Brief article)
February 16, 2009... UPS, now a proxy for the economy, said that domestic volumes were down 2.8% in the fourth quarter and that its premium next-day air service was down 8.6%. UPS CEO Scott Davis said the world's largest package delivery service had no idea...

Japan Has Second Thoughts.(Brief article)
February 16, 2009... The current prime minister of Japan Taro Aso has doubts about the efficiency and profitability of the carved-up Japan Post, the key reform won by his predecessor after a big political rumpus. Quoting a local press report, Bloomberg says...

Bull To Automate Casablanca International Mail Center.
February 16, 2009... Bull is going to manage the Moroccan Post Office's automation project at its International Mail Center in Casablanca. As coordinator of the project, Bull will lead a group of partners including AddressVision Inc (AVI), its subsidiary...

Melissa Data Acquires M1 Data & Analytics.
February 16, 2009... Melissa Data, which develops high-performance contact data verification and mail management solutions, has acquired M1 Data & Analytics from Metro One Telecommunications Inc. Terms were not disclosed. M1 is a marketing list wholesaler and...

Western Union & India Post Renew Money Transfer Agreement.
February 16, 2009... Western Union, the old telegram company now big in money transfers, and India Post, have renewed a multi-year agreement to extend the availability of the Western Union Money Transfer service throughout India.

Pitney Keeps Truckin'.
February 16, 2009... Pitney Bowes, which was encumbered by losses a year ago, said that it realized a net income of $74 million, 36 cents a share, in the December quarter, on revenue of $1.55 billion, down 6.7% year-over-year. For the year it cleared $429.8...

Microsoft To Push Two Main Win7 SKUs.
February 16, 2009... Microsoft - which has yet to get its tit out of the legal wringer it got caught it because of the famous "Vista Capable" promotion - has started trying to discriminate between Windows 7 SKUs now, a year ahead of the operating system's...

Lenovo Runs Red; CEO Out.
February 16, 2009... Lenovo, which has been getting whacked by Acer, lost $96.7 million in the December quarter, the Chinese company's first loss in three years, and so its American CEO, Bill Amelio, a Dell refuge, was thrown on his sword while senior VP of...

Google Wants Out of AOL Deal.
February 16, 2009... Google wants Time Warner to spin off AOL into its own public company or buy back Google's 5% let's-keep-Microsoft-out stake in the joint at fair market value, a demand it's justified in making by the terms of their three-year-old arrangement....

Citrix Claims To Cut the Cost of Desktop Virtualization.
February 16, 2009... Citrix says it's improved the scalability of XenDesktop, its desktop virtualization widgetry, so the thing can now host twice as many virtual desktops per server than it could last week. Where the ratio with XenServer was 30-50 servers to...

Dell's Got a New Little Virtualization Friend, Xsigo.
February 16, 2009... Dell has tapped Xsigo to provide I/O virtualization so it can connect servers to multiple networks and storage and optimize data centers. Dell, which now says it offers virtualized solutions end-to-end, is supposed to resell all of Xsigo's...

$10 Indian Laptop a Lot of Hooey.
February 16, 2009... Photo: K.V. Poornachandra Kumar Source: The Hindu The world's press spent billions of pixels this week in feverish anticipation of the Indian government pulling off what was supposed to be a $10 school laptop. They were spent for naught....

Ma.gnolia Dies; Takes User Data with It.(Brief article)
February 16, 2009... Ma.gnolia, one of those chi-chi social bookmarking sites like Delicious, has gone down and doesn't look like it's going to get back up any time soon, indicating the hazards of storing data online without a local backup. This is the message...

VMware Open Sources Virtual Desktop Code.
February 16, 2009... VMware is going open source. It's conjured up View Open Client, an open source client for virtual desktop infrastructure meant to be used by data centers for hosting user desktops and making personalized user desktops accessible from most...

IBM To Build World's Most Powerful Computer.
February 16, 2009... IBM is going built a supercomputer most powerful than ever built before for the Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration. Worthy of its name, Sequoia, which will run Linux, will be based on future IBM BlueGene...

DOD Creates its Own Sourceforge.(Brief article)
February 16, 2009... The US Defense Department has created forge.mil, its own Red Hat-based security-defended knockoff of Sourceforge accessible only with smartcards for those who would edit or contribute open source code and a DOD, CAC or ECA certificate. It's...

Canonical Aims at the Server.
February 16, 2009... So Canonical, which is associated with Linux on the desktop, hired RedMonk to count noses last November and December and RedMonk posted a questionnaire on Canonical's web site geared to Ubuntu Server users and almost 7,000 of them responded and...

CSC Kicks Off Cloud Initiative.
February 16, 2009... Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), the big consulting and outsourcing services company, has put in train a company-wide cloud computing and software services initiative to deliver SaaS and managed cloud solutions. The operation will be run by...

Dell To Offer SUSE on Thin Clients.
February 16, 2009... Novell says that Dell's going to preload SUSE Linux Enterprise Thin Client onto its three-month-old OptiPlex FX160 thin client. Novell quotes IDC projecting that the Linux thin client market will grow from nearly a million units last year to...

Netbooks Salvage Europe's Q4.
February 16, 2009... PC sales in Western Europe were up 12% to 20.1 million units in the fourth quarter on the back of netbook demand according to Gartner, which said, "If it wasn't for mini-notebooks, the overall Western European market would be showing a decline....

Microsoft Asked if Foreigners Will Be Fired First.
February 16, 2009... After Microsoft announced that it's going to lay off 5,000 people over the next 18 months starting with an immediate 1,400 jobs and goodness knows how many contractors, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa sent Steve Ballmer a letter,...

Symantec CEO Will Not Be Secretary of Commerce.
February 16, 2009... After looking for a while there like a shoe-in, Symantec's outgoing CEO John W Thompson is NOT going to be secretary of commerce in the Obama administration. Instead the new president crossed party lines again and picked Republican Senator Judd...

Swiss Post Changes Earth Class Mail's Business Model.
February 23, 2009... Swiss Post, which thinks it could wind up being more powerful than Google, has turned Earth Class Mail (ECM), the digital postal mail start-up that thinks it can save the postal establishment from electronic Armageddon, upside down, forcing it...

Zumbox Challenges Earth Class Mail.
February 23, 2009... A California start-up called Zumbox, claiming to be the first all-digital online alternative to traditional paper postal systems and armed with a limited public beta, is taking on Earth Class Mail. Earth Class Mail claims its would-be rival...

Royal Mail Sell-Off May Be Stymied.
February 23, 2009... Britain's Labor government is in quite a pickle over its plan to partially privatize the Royal Mail. Backbenchers from its own majority Labor Party are in revolt, their signatures collecting on a motion to reject the move, enough that the...

TNT Picking Royal Mail's Lock on Last Mile.
February 23, 2009... Holland's TNT, which is talking to the UK government about buying a third of the Royal Mail, is now putting pressure on the Royal Mail's lock on the so-called "last mile." TNT currently pays the Royal Mail to deliver the mail it handles to...

Deutsche Post Ups Dutch Investment.(Brief article)
February 23, 2009... Deutsche Post is buying the 49% of Selekt Mail Netherlands that it doesn't already own from its joint venture partner for about four million euros ($5.2 million). Selekt is a competitor of Deutsche Post bte noire TNT. Last year...

USPS Raises Prices.
February 23, 2009... Pleading rising operational costs, the US Postal Service has raised its prices. Symbolically a First Class Stamp has gone up two cents to 44 cents, the maximum it could legally go. The USPS was reportedly reluctant to ask for more for fear...

Court Nixes EC's Rubberstamp OK of Belgian Subsidy.(Brief article)
February 23, 2009... Europe's Court of First Instance in Luxembourg has scotched the European Commission's rubberstamp approval of 297.5 million euros ($384 million) in state aid to raise the level of the Belgian Post's capital. The decision was made in response to...

PC Postage Surviving Downturn.
February 23, 2009... Total Q4 revenue was down 8% to $22.3 million at Internet postage house Stamps.com. PC postage subscriber revenue, however, including service, store and insurance revenues, was up 4% to $18.3 million producing a margin of 79.5%, down...