ePostal News articles from January 2006

ePostal News archives from January 2006

Bull awarded big contract to network La Poste sorting machines.
January 9, 2006... As part of its Cap Qualite Courrier program, the French Post Office La Poste, which dreams of being the reference platform of European posts, has authorized the Mail Directorate to award Groupe Bull and Lockheed Martin a contract worth 147...

Canada Post ponders ways to commercialize fetch.(consumer advertising program)
January 9, 2006... Canada Post is weighing the best ways to commercialize fetch after a successful pilot and positive reaction from consumers, advertisers and media. The decision is supposed to reflect its strategy of focusing on improving its core business. ...

Finland Post to use mCorrection address look-up.
January 9, 2006... Finland Post Group has licensed Syslore's mCorrection Secondary Address Recognitionv software for real-time letter sorting for its promised cost savings and efficiency improvements. The widgetry, which is supposed to cut manual mail sorting...

Online holiday shopping sets new record.
January 9, 2006... Online holiday spending was up 25%-30% year-over-year according to early findings by Nielsen/NetRatings, which figures that US shoppers spent $30.1 billion online between October 29 and December 23. The money represented 27% of the total...

DHL sends clients a CARE package.
January 9, 2006... DHL has launched what it calls the DHL Partnership CARE program CARE standing for Customer Activation Resolution and Enhancement and designed to identify and tailor solutions to individual customer needs. The program is supposed to ensure...

TNT web site takes first place.
January 9, 2006... According to Webranking 2005, published by the Financial Times, the TNT web site (http://group.tnt.com) ranks as best corporate web site in Europe. In 2004 TNT was ranked number three. A total of approximately 500 companies were reviewed...

Japan Post disqualifies Goldman Sachs unit.
January 9, 2006... Japan Post is refusing to do business with Goldman Sachs Asset Management down the road because the Goldman Sachs unit is in Dutch with Japanese regulators at the country's Financial Services Agency for reportedly violating investment trust law...

HP CEO makes the status quo look sexy.
January 9, 2006... HP CEO Mark Hurd is beguiled by HP's technology. When he got to the company eight months ago, he told Wall Street analysts a few days before Christmas, he found way more technology than he ever imagined. Of course overwhelming Mark with...

New blackberry alternative sues Microsoft for infringement.
January 9, 2006... Visto, the nine-year-old wireless e-mail house, has sued Microsoft in the Eastern District of Texas, a reputedly IP-savvy court, for infringing on three patents that Visto holds on mobile access to e-mail. It claims Windows Mobile 5.0 is in...

Oracle doesn't make numbers despite acquisition binge.(PeopleSoft Inc. acquired)
January 9, 2006... Oracle reported its fiscal Q2 numbers before the end of last year, hitting GAAP revenues of $3.3 billion, up 19% year-over-year, and earning 15 cents a share, or $798 million, down 2%. The revenue was below Oracle's predicted range of $3.37...

IBM opens its patent portfolio to pet start-ups.
January 9, 2006... IBM, which collects a small fortune in patent royalties each year, has promised to open its entire patent portfolio--some 40,000 patents--to pet VC-backed start-ups on cheaper, simplified terms under a new IBM Ventures in Collaboration program....

Evil empire commits to 'irrevocable covenant' not to sue.
January 9, 2006... IBM, as one might expect, is throwing its weight behind the Sun-created counter-Microsoft Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF) that Massachusetts is backing, pending review. IBM said Workplace Managed Client 2.6, due early...

VMware delivers VMware player.
January 9, 2006... VMware has announced the general availability of VMware Player, the widely expected freebie product that should let anyone to run, evaluate and share software in a virtual machine on a Windows or Linux PC. VMware Player installs like a...

Microsoft pairs with MCI on VoIP.
January 9, 2006... Microsoft and telecommunications maven MCI, soon to be part of Verizon, have cut a multi-year partnership covering the software and services that will let users call from a PC to almost any phone in the world, including cell phones, pitting the...

Microsoft cuts office deal with Autodesk.
January 9, 2006... Design information from Autodesk applications is going to available to Office, Great Plains and Axapta users compliments of new Autodesk DWF (Design Web Format) widgetry that's come as part of an expanded alliance between AutoDesk and...

Mandriva aims to be the alternative Linux.
January 9, 2006... Paris-based Mandriva (nee Mandrakesoft) has ambitions. It wants to be a player. It wants to make the Linux scene into a three-horse race and apparently isn't put off by the fact that Novell, a company with way more resources than the...

Microsoft launches windows live local.
January 9, 2006... Microsoft has released Windows Live Local, another service under its newfangled Windows Live.com initiative. This was supposed to be the satellite imagery for its retired MSN Virtual Earth service but it never made it. Reminiscent of...

Sun puts open Java DB in Java enterprise system.
January 9, 2006... Sun has made the open source Java DB, the Sun-supported distribution of the Apache Derby Project, part of its Java Enterprise System stack, saying the move reinforces its position that Solaris 10 is the best platform for database development...

Business objects & MySQL expand partnership.(Brief article)
January 9, 2006... MySQL AB has signed a new OEM referral agreement with Business Objects so the two can jointly sell integrated solutions combining MySQL's Network database subscription service with business intelligence software from Business Objects. They say...

Quanta to make Negroponte's $100 laptop.(for Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
January 9, 2006... Quanta is going to make those ruggedized $100 Linux laptops thought up by Nicholas Negroponte and other faculty at MIT's Media Lab to leap the Digital Divide in the third world. Their One Laptop per Child non-profit announced the contract...

IBM opens power spec to researchers.
January 9, 2006... In a move that smacks of Sun open sourcing its multi-core Niagara chip, IBM says it's going to make the PowerPC 405 core specifications freely available to researchers and academia and do it naturally enough through the year-old Power.org. ...

Steve case repents AOL-time Warner deal.
January 9, 2006... Ex-AOL CEO Steve Case, the guy who put AOL and Time Warner together in one of the great mismatches of the last century, says the company should be broken up. Writing in the Washington Post recently Case argued that TW should be split into...

MTV-Microsoft get the URGE.
January 9, 2006... Viacom division MTV Networks and Microsoft are developing a digital music service called URGE that will be out this year. Microsoft will build it; MTV will own and operate it. It'll be part of the next-generation Windows Media Player and...

IMs connect.(Microsoft Office Communicator Web Access launched)(Brief article)
January 9, 2006... Microsoft Office Communicator Web Access, a webified enterprise communications client based on the chi-chi Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) technologies for Office Live Communications Server 2005, has been released to manufacturing. It'll...

Eckhard surfaces at HDS.
January 9, 2006... MDS has named former Compaq CEO Eckhard Pfeiffer, who bought DEC, to its executive advisory board to advise it on strategy and go-to-market activities and offer guidance on various new initiatives. Pfeiffer is currently chairman of Accoona...

Intel loses round in AMD antitrust case.
January 9, 2006... Intel has suffered a setback in the antitrust suit AMD has lodged against it. A Tokyo District Court ordered that evidence found in 2004 raids on Intel Japan and Japanese OEMs be turned over to AMD so it can use it in its case. The...

Symantec hints about service.
January 9, 2006... Symantec has been dropping hints that it may start offering its consumer anti-virus widgetry as a service.

Iona to provide express delivery for Poste Italiane Group.
January 16, 2006... The Poste Italiane Group is going to deploy Artix, Iona Technologies' extensible Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). Iona, the publicly traded Dublin and Massachusetts high-performance, mission-critical integration house, says Artix will be the...

Microsoft to use Group 1 Software.
January 16, 2006... Group 1 Software Inc, the Pitney Bowes company, says that Microsoft is going to incorporate its GeoStan geocoding software and data into its online offerings, MapPoint Web Service and Windows Live Local, for real-time geocode assignment....

The Royal Mail introduces just built mailing lists.
January 16, 2006... Britain's Royal Mail is using its unique position in allocating postcodes and addresses to peddle a new mailing list, called Just Built, of all new addresses as they become active. As the agency notes, "When properties are built or...

TNT to put RFID tags on PCs sent from China.
January 16, 2006... TNT Express, the arm of the big Dutch mail and logistics house, is going to use Texas-based Xterprise's RFID widgetry to track PCs made in China and sent to Europe. Xterprise says phase one of a pilot tracked and reported on laptops at the case...

Rate hike could cost the USPS.(United States. Postal Service)
January 16, 2006... The two cents more that it's going to cost to mail a first-class one-ounce letter in the US now that the rate increase has gone into effect is supposed to push more people into paying their bills online. It's also going to cost more to...

La Poste moves again on its modernization plan.
January 16, 2006... La Poste has handed Technip, the big Paris construction company, a 3.5 million euro services contract to integrate the first two automated sorting facilities called for under La Poste's defining "Mail Quality Project," the biggest modernization...

Canada Post skates through Christmas.(with the help of mail monitoring system )(Brief article)
January 16, 2006... Canada Post is patting itself on the back for getting through Christmas brilliantly. Rick Joubert, the director of its National Control Centre, which it figures is its ace in the hole, says, "It was a very successful holiday period. We...

Gates pitches Vista into the living room.
January 16, 2006... Bill Gates kicked off the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas last week with a keynote peddling Microsoft's all-important upcoming Vista operating system, focusing on its search, security and digital entertainment possibilities. It was...

Ex-CA CEO seeks to avoid prison pin stripes.(Computer Associates Chief Executive Officer)(Brief article)
January 16, 2006... Lawyers for Computer Associates' ousted CEO Sanjay Kumar and former executive VP of sales Stephen Richards have been in court lately arguing that federal prosecutors are misinterpreting a criminal statute in prosecuting their clients, exposing...

Intel remakes its logo.
January 16, 2006... Told ya so. Told ya so. Told ya weeks ago that Intel was tinkering with its logo. The company, which now wants to be associated with platforms and not just microprocessors, is weaning itself of its "Intel Inside" tagline. The word Intel...

CA buys Wily.
January 16, 2006... CA, which as you'll recall wants to be called CA, not Computer Associates, is buying five-year-old privately held Wily Technology for $375 million in cash for its application management software. The company is only expected to become...

McAfee gets its hand slapped.(Network Associates Inc. fined)(Brief article)
January 16, 2006... As a result of a formal SEC investigation of its financials that started in March of 2002, McAfee said that it would pay a $50 million fine. McAfee won't have to admit any wrongdoing or restate its results again. It will however have to...

Oracle drops multi-core pricing.(Brief article)
January 16, 2006... Well, it looks like Oracle has gone through some attitude adjustment and dropped its multi-core prices--at least on mainstream Intel and AMD chips. It's now counting each of their cores as a half a CPU, down from the three-quarters stance it...

Microsoft fails to nail AOL deal.
January 16, 2006... Microsoft failed in its primary mission of 2005, which was to tie up with AOL and give the vaunted Google search engine a run for its money. Everybody thought Microsoft would make Time Warner an offer it couldn't refuse just to steal the...

EC threatens Microsoft--again.
January 16, 2006... The European Commission stuck coal in Microsoft's stocking for Christmas for not adequately disclosing its server/ client protocols like it was ordered to do and threatened to start fining the company the equivalent of close to $2.4 million a...

Lenovo scraps IBM-supplied CEO.
January 16, 2006... For Christmas Lenovo Group CEO Steve Ward, who ran IBM's PC operation and transferred over to the Chinese company when Lenovo acquired it, lost his job. Lenovo has brought in the head of Dell's Asia-Pacific operation Bill Amelio, another...

Google-Microsoft secret Santa.
January 16, 2006... Microsoft has settled with Google and the new president of Google China, former Microsoft VP Kai-fu Lee. It was the corporate version of a secret Santa though 'cause nobody will say what the settlement came down to. Just that all the highly...

Massachusetts CIO quits amid format hubbub.
January 16, 2006... Peter Quinn, the Massachusetts CIO who pushed the state to bar Microsoft and adopt the Sun-IBM-backed OpenDocument format instead, quit his job on Christmas Eve, citing the personal publicity generated by the controversial initiative, according...

IBM buys Micromuse & Bowstreet.
January 16, 2006... IBM Software is buying Micromuse, whose software manages data, video and voice traffic on computer networks, for roughly $865 million in cash. The acquisition, which should close this quarter, will be added to IBM's Tivoli collection. ...

Microsoft reportedly pressuring CIOs on Linux' legal risks.
January 16, 2006... Merrill Lynch trotted out its latest CIO survey and reported that 11 of the hundred guys they interviewed said that "they have been pressured about the purported legal risk of Linux, mostly by Microsoft." Merrill said just eight of them...

Friends of Google boost stock.
January 16, 2006... On the first trading day of the New Year Piper Jaffray analyst Safa Rashtchy raised the broker's price target price on Google's stock from $445 to $600 because of Google's dominance of "an already large yet still rapidly growing market, its...

Google unveils Google pack.
January 16, 2006... Google co-founder Larry Page delivered a keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show last Friday, his first such showing--and not a particularly natural Google venue--a fact that set off speculation and news reports that he might announce a...

UK reviews its IP policies.
January 16, 2006... The UK government has kicked off a review of the country's IP protection, handing the job to the former editor of the Financial Times Andrew Gowers, who will report back to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Secretary of State for Trade and...

HP and CSC?
January 16, 2006... HP CEO Mark Hurd must have had his fingers crossed behind his back when he told Wall Street that HP wasn't thinking of making a big acquisition. The other day the world woke up to the news that HP and the Blackstone Group might buy Computer...

ADVO first to update mailing list weekly.
January 30, 2006... ADVO Inc, the $1.4 billion-a-year direct mail media company and owner of what it says is the most comprehensive residential and business mailing list in the US, has become the first company to add the weekly address updates now available from...

USPS employs technology for deaf workers.
January 30, 2006... The US Postal Service--one of the country's largest employers of people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing - is offering new technology so its employees can communicate with each other better. Two types of video interpreting services are being...

Firstlogic starts blogging.
January 30, 2006... Firstlogic, the global of commercial mail and enterprise data quality solutions and services provider, has launched a new commercial mail blog on mail-focused topics of interest to anyone involved in mailing processes for small business, quick...

Russia Post to introduce hybrid mail scheme.
January 30, 2006... Russia Post has developed a hybrid mail system dubbed PAPERIP.RU that will deliver Internet-based text, photos and drawings to the physical post address of Russian citizens from any computer connected to the Internet. The data is sent to a...

Overstock.com goes to Newgistics for returns technology.
January 30, 2006... Internet retailer Overstock.com has gone to Newgistics Inc for its returns management solutions SmartLabel and ReturnCart. Newgistics' solutions provide multi-carrier functionality, dynamic tracking and pre-sorting of returned goods, which...

Mexican Postal Code database released.
January 30, 2006... ZIPCodeWorld.com has released its PostalCodeWorld Mexico Gold Edition Postal Codes database, said to provide a complete table of Mexico postal codes, colony name, city name, state name, latitude, longitude, area code, time zone and daylight...

RFID watch.
January 30, 2006... According to IDC 12% of the manufacturing, retail/wholesale and logistics companies in Western Europe are rolling out RFID widgetry and another 5% are piloting it. Those standing back are reportedly concerned about the track-andtrace...

Whoops!
January 30, 2006... The Japan Post won't be able to develop a computer system by October of 2007 when it's supposed to divide into four parts in the run-up to privatization when was supposed to have the thing, according to the Financial Times.

Aussie post gets CIO.
January 30, 2006... The CIO of BlueScope Steel, Wayne Saunders, has been named CIO of the Australia Post. He was instrumental in implementing SAP across all of the steel business.

Bowe Bell + Howell to offer NC4 financing.
January 30, 2006... Bowe Bell + Howell has arranged for National City Commercial Capital Corporation (NC4), the $146 billion vendor-leasing finance companies, to offer financing to customers acquiring its products. Bowe Bell + Howell expects the financing...

The ubiquitous cell phone.
January 30, 2006... Half of the world's population will be using a cell phone by the end of 2009, according to a new study by Portio Research. Africa is now the fastest-growing market, expected to add 265 million new mobile subscribers in the next six years. ...

Egenera takes new approach to the great watts crisis.(BladeFrame EX introduced)
January 30, 2006... Egenera this week introduced its third-generation BladeFrame, a widget dubbed BladeFrame EX that promises to double the I/O performance and Ethernet connectivity of the company's existing hardware infrastructure--and along with it a new...

AMD beats the pants off Intel.
January 30, 2006... Absent its recent Spansion flash spin-off and focusing just on its core MPU business, AMD said that it had sales of $1.35 billion in the last quarter, a 78% increase year-over-year and a 34% increase sequentially. Intel the day before had...

Halfway to Fusion.(Oracle Corp. on its project fusion)(Brief article)
January 30, 2006... Oracle's web-based Project Fusion, wherein all of the software that it acquired in its $19 billion buying spree is supposed to be integrated together, is on track to appear in 2008 according to what Oracle has told customers. Oracle said...

Intel blows the quarter.
January 30, 2006... Intel's fourth quarter came up short of its own and Wall Street expectations having come apart at the end of December. The company turned up with earnings of $2.5 billion, or 40 cents a share, on revenues of $10.2 billion, up 2% sequentially...

Google strikes out in new direction.(Google Inc. to acquire dMarc Networks Inc.)(Brief article)
January 30, 2006... Google is buying privately held dMarc Broadcasting Inc, which has automated radio ad placement, for its AdWords arm at a cost of $102 million in cash to start plus additional payments that could soar to $1.136 billion over the next three years...

HP Latin America picks up Mandriva.
January 30, 2006... Mandriva, which wants to make the Red Hat-Novell race into a triad, says HP is pre-loading machines with Mandriva Linux 2006 bound for 37 Latin American countries. Mandriva, remember, merged with Brazil-based Connectiva. Mandriva says that...

Icahn's AOL vision.(America Online Inc. to merge with Warner Bros.)(Brief article)
January 30, 2006... AimeWarner's unhappy-enough-to-threaten-a-proxy-fight stockholder Carl Icahn and his investor group want the company to merge AOL and its entertainment interests with a smaller Internet portal, according to the Wall Street Journal. That would...

XP SP3 pushed out.
January 30, 2006... Microsoft is now anticipating delivering XP Service Pack 3 way out in the second half of 2007, a year later than most people thought considering Steve Ballmer had suggested it could be out before Long Horn. Microsoft apparently used a...

Blue's priorities.
January 30, 2006... IBM watchers say Blue's themes for the new year are SOA, software as a service and probable business performance transformation, which IBM calls a "multibillion-dollar opportunity." IBM has just created a Business Transformation Outsourcing...

Is Steve Jobs the new Walt Disney?(Pixar Animation Studios to acquire Walt Disney Co.)(Brief article)
January 30, 2006... In case you haven't caught up with this bit of news, according to the Wall Street Journal, now that that nasty Michael Eisner isn't running Disney anymore, Disney may take over Pixar, Steve Jobs' other company, a deal that would make Steve, who...

PC shipments up 17.1% in Q4: IDC.
January 30, 2006... PC shipments were up 17.1% in Q4 to 61.1 million units, according to IDC, off slightly in the US with overseas, particularly China, South Korea and India, picking up the slack and laptops leading the way. IDC only expected 15.1% growth. Dell...