ePostal News articles from January 2007

ePostal News archives from January 2007

DHL & IBM develop RFID pharma sensor.
January 15, 2007... DHL and IBM have developed a new RFID sensor solution for the pharmaceutical industry that's supposed to significantly improve the monitoring of temperature-controlled transport. The RFID tag controls and documents the temperature of items...

ErgoGroup buys SYSteam.
January 15, 2007... Norway Post's ErgoGroup has signed a contract to buy more than 90% of SYSteam's operations in Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark. ErgoGroup wants it all and will chase the other shareholders, reportedly SYSteam employees, with an offer to buy...

White House claims apparently surprise postal powers.
January 15, 2007... President Bush signed the US postal reform bill that was a decade in the making into law on December 20 and once the press shook off its collective New Year's hangover and read the fine print it discovered that the White House appeared to be...

Anti-liberalization web site set up.
January 15, 2007... UNI-Europa Postal has set up an online petition protesting the European Commission mandate to totally liberalize postal services by January 1 2009 and open so-called "small mail," the last vestige of the old monopoly system, to competition. ...

US consumer shows hearty appetite for buying online.
January 15, 2007... ComScore Networks, which measures such things, said that Americans spent $23.11 billion online during the holiday season, up 26% over the year before. Sales were up 38% the week before Christmas and for the year-to-date up until December 23 the...

FedEx under investigation on both sides of the pond.
January 15, 2007... The Friday before Christmas FedEx said it had gotten a formal request for information from the European Commission's antitrust unit. It's already under investigation by the US Justice Department. What exactly the EC is looking for is unclear...

Troop movements.
January 15, 2007... UPS said Monday that it had named David Abney chief operating office and tapped Alan Gershenhorn to replace him as president of UPS International. Abney will also be president of UPS Airlines as well as being responsible for all of UPS'...

Last of Lockheed machines go in.
January 15, 2007... Lockheed Martin has deployed the last of the 74 Automated Package Processing Systems that the US Postal Service bought under a $300 million contract signed in 2002. They're supposed to give the post office a fully integrated end-to-end...

Amazon countersues IBM, citing WebSphere; Calls big blue a patent troll that wants to tax the Internet.
January 15, 2007... In response to the whopping great suit that IBM filed against Amazon.com in October, the one that lays claim to God knows how many hundreds of millions in damages for alleged infringing a handful of utterly fundamental e-commerce business...

Symantec, McAfee get draft Vista APIs.
January 15, 2007... Microsoft has given security vendors like Symantec and McAfee, which two months before very publicly complained of being locked out of Vista because of Microsoft's new "you-can't get-to-the-64-bit kernel" PatchGuard widgetry, draft APIs that...

Oracle's retro-rockets sputter.
January 15, 2007... Twenty billion-odd dollars later and Oracle's fiscal Q2 numbers were up 26% on the revenues side to $4.2 billion and up 21% on the earnings side to $967 million, or 18 cents a share, but a little light on new database and applications software...

Seagate buys EVault.
January 15, 2007... Seagate Technology is buying privately held online backup house EVault Inc for $185 million in cash. The company's metier is SMEs, a market Seagate says is worth $1 billion a year and is increasingly being forced to meet the same kind of...

AOL restructuring--again.
January 15, 2007... There's blood on the floor of AOL's executive suite. Three top executives are leaving and will officially be gone in March: AOL International chairman Joe Redling, who also doubles as the president of AOL Mobile; executive VP of programming...

Intel takes discovery hit in AMD antitrust suit.
January 15, 2007... Well, it looks like AMD may get the foreign discovery it wants in its US antitrust suit against Intel. The special master assigned by the presiding judge to look into the issue says it should. Intel decided not to buck the decision on...

Panasonic promises better battery.
January 15, 2007... Matsushita Electric, also known as Panasonic, claims to have come up with a better rechargeable lithium-ion battery that unlike Sony's infamous lithium-ion batteries, which sparked the largest recall in computer history, won't start fires. ...

AMD opens futuristic lab.
January 15, 2007... Sounding infinitely hopeful, AMD has opened a new Advanced Architecture and Technology Lab in Redmond that's supposed to look beyond the five-year time horizon. It's put it under the direction of AMD Fellow and chief architectural officer Rich...

FSF sets up mudslinging anti-Vista site.
January 15, 2007... Go check out http://BadVista.org. The Linux-loving Free Software Foundation (FSF) has launched a Groklaw-inspired site to expose "the harms inflicted on computer users" by Microsoft's new operating system and to promote free software...

Red Hat foils Oracle, Microsoft so far.
January 15, 2007... Red Hat managed to increase its fiscal Q3 revenues a hefty 45% year-over-year but its earnings took a 37% dive. The company, which is under fire from Oracle and Microsoft, did $14.6 million, or seven cents a share, on revenues of $105.8...

Samba leader quits Novell in protest over patent clause in Microsoft deal.
January 15, 2007... Lead Samba developer Jeremy Allison is the new open source folk hero. He quit Novell at the end of the year because of the patent clause in the company's controversial weeks-old alliance with Microsoft under which Novell pays Microsoft...

Microsoft moves its first Linux subscriptions.
January 15, 2007... Novell claims Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse and AIG Technologies, part of the big insurance company, are taking advantage of the infamous Microsoft-Novell interoperability pact. Microsoft is supposed to provide them with SUSE subscription...

IBM & US universities embark on open source research.
January 15, 2007... American universities--well, some of them anyway--make a lot of money off IP thanks in part to laws that let them hold patents on federally funded research and license the widgetry. Whether it's liberal guilt or not, seven of them, nudged...

Linux-on-mainframe apps up 100%: IBM.
January 15, 2007... PBM counted noses and says there are now nearly 1,000 Linux applications that run on its mainframes, a 100% jump in a year, a fact it attributes to virtualization and basic mainframe performance. IBM recently reported a 390% jump in...

Opteron & Athlon64 'aging': Wall Street.
January 15, 2007... Opteron and the Athlon64 are "aging" architectures according to Nollenberger Capital analyst Hans Mosesmann and Intel's Core 2 Duo eats its lunch in 95% of all PC applications. AMD is also, as everyone knows, late in moving to 65nm. ...

Google reported interested in ThinkFree.
January 15, 2007... Rumor has it that Google is interested in ThinkFree, the HaanSoft-owned, ad-supported, Java-based, very Microsoft-like, Microsoft-compatible online office suite. It sent its YouTube acquisition folks in to talk to the Korean concern...

Microsoft irritates Google.
January 15, 2007... Pumors of a deal between Microsoft and dominant Chinese search engine Baidu.com proved true. Baidu, the fourth most-visited site in the world, is gonna sell ads for MSN and other Microsoft web sites and Microsoft is gonna display Baidu's paid...

YouTube rebuttal reportedly in works.
January 15, 2007... News Corp, Viacom, CBS and NBC Universal parent General Electric are reportedly trying to gang up on YouTube with a video-sharing YouTube-like site of their own, according to the Wall Street Journal, even if--illegally poached videos to one...

UBL 2.0 standardized.
January 15, 2007... Oasis has declared Universal Business Language (UBL) 2.0 a standard. It defines a royalty-free library of standard electronic XML business documents such as purchase orders and invoices, meant for extended procurement scenarios, that the...

USPS trots out a 'GPS' scheme for business mail.
January 22, 2007... The US Postal Service claims that what it calls "Intelligent Mail" will "revolutionize" business mail by 2009. The agency is proposing to use a combination of standardized intelligent barcodes, continuous mail tracking and real-time...

Spanish Post starts offering vanity stamps.(Brief article)
January 22, 2007... At the turn of the year the Spanish Post started offering personalized stamps decked out with the customers' own pictures or logos. The offer extends to both consumers and businesses through www.correos.es. Folks have to fill out an online form...

Harris teams with Adecco to pursue USPS contract.
January 22, 2007... Harris Corporation, which is chasing a $200 million technical and quality assurance support contract with the US Postal Service engineering organization in Merrifield, Virginia, has added Adecco Technical Services to its team. The contract is...

Resistance to White House Postal claims starts building.(Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act)(Brief article)
January 22, 2007... With the White House seeming to claim sweeping powers to open suspicious First Class mail without a warrant when President Bush signed the landmark Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act into law last month, Senator Susan Collins, one of the...

Swiss Post arm moves into e-health.(Yellowworld enters into contract with InterComponentWare AG)(Brief article)
January 22, 2007... Yellowworld, the IT application services and outsourcing arm of the Swiss Post Group, and InterComponentWare AG, the Swiss e-health specialist, have signed a contract for Yellowworld to market a web-based solution called LifeSensor to DP...

Denmark Post subsidy to digitize the country's real estate titles.
January 22, 2007... Data Scanning, a Denmark Post subsidiary, together with three other companies, is going to be part of a massive project to digitize the country's real estate titles. Currently when you buy a house or tract of land in Denmark or take out a...

Apple & Cisco squabble over iPhone name.
January 22, 2007... Cisco peed on Steve Jobs' running shoes by up and suing Apple for infringing on its iPhone trademark a day after Jobs announced the June arrival of a radical new eponymous widget at MacWorld in San Francisco that the New York Times claims is...

Intel's prices hit AMD's fourth quarter.
January 22, 2007... Late last Thursday, very late in fact, AMD put out a statement saying that its Q4 revenues--excluding anything it might see out of its ATI acquisition--would only be up 3% from the $1.33 billion it reported in calendar Q3, a number, roughly...

Dell to carve up its main business unit.
January 22, 2007... Joe Marengi, the 51-year-old general manager of Dell's commercial business group, which includes servers, storage and PC and accounts for 85% of the company's revenues, will be leaving at the end of March, retiring they say, and then Dell is...

NCR to spin off Teradata later this year.
January 22, 2007... NCR is going to spin its Teradata data warehousing business off into a publicly traded company. When exactly depends on board authorization, an IRS ruling, SEC filings and the usual IPO preparations, but it won't be for another six-nine...

Intel releases first mainstream quad.
January 22, 2007... Intel has come out with its first mainstream quad chip, a part branded a Core 2 Quad for the occasion and made immediately available. There are also two other new quads, giving Intel a total of nine versions of the widget for the desktop...

Dell discovers the color green not a moment too soon.
January 22, 2007... Michael Dell has issued a long-overdue call for the PC industry to adopt free global recycling programs, calling the idea the "right thing to do for our earth." For the last six months Dell, the company, has recycled any electronics gear,...

PTO does bang-up business.
January 22, 2007... The US Patent and Trademark Office issued a record 173,222 corporate patents last year, up 21% year-over-year according to IFI Patent Intelligence. And for the 14th year in a row IBM got more than anybody else, 3,651 of them, a personal best....

DHL US to install new RFID-ready scanning system.
January 29, 2007... DHL is adopting the latest "new generation" scanning technology, deploying a single system across its entire US network to enhance shipment visibility for its customers. The new scanning devices, used to capture shipment information by...

India Post wants to technologize.(Brief article)
January 29, 2007... The Indian Department of Post is proposing that the India Post spend $317 million over five years on technologies such as RFID, web-based customer response systems and mobile phones for the mailman to compete with courier like DHL. The...

B2C e-commerce to boost European parcels business.
January 29, 2007... International and business-to-consumer (B2C) parcels delivery volumes are supposed to be the fastest growth sectors in Europe's parcels and delivery market over the next five years, according to market analyst Datamonitor. It predicts that...

Most companies unprepared for proposed price hike, new rules: Pitney Bowes.
January 29, 2007... Pitney Bowes says four out of five executives are unprepared for the proposed price and rules changes that are supposed to come into effect in the US in four months. It describes them as " the most significant overhaul of postage rates in...

ACLU file Freedom of information request over Bush's claimed postal powers.
January 29, 2007... The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for National Security Studies filed three Freedom of Information Act requests Monday seeking the immediate release of records related to President Bush's asserted authority to search Americans'...

Microsoft discovers e-commerce it will sell Vista & Office 2007 online.
January 29, 2007... With only a few days left to go before the Great Vista Rollout to consumers on January 30 and missing no trick, Microsoft said that it would break with its tradition of boxed or pre-loaded software and supply the thing online. It's come up...

Dell eats more of HP's dust.
January 29, 2007... For the second time in a row HP beat out Dell in moving PCs worldwide, this time increasing its lead, according to both Gartner and IDC. Gartner reckons HP shipments in Q4 grew 24% in Q4, giving it 17.4% of the world market, and it figures...

Intel feels the pinch too.
January 29, 2007... Cutting AMD off at the knees in Q4 left Intel limping a bit too. Sequentially Intel did great--revenues up 11%, hitting the top of its projections, income up 15%, operating income up 8%--enough for CFO Andy Bryant to characterize Intel's...

HP creates new software division.
January 29, 2007... HP has created a new division inside its software operation called the Business Information Optimization Group. The new unit will be broken into two groups, a business intelligence group and an information management group. The...

Feds poke around Apple.
January 29, 2007... Despite Apple's attempts to make it all go away, the SEC, which is known to be sensitive about forged documents, has reportedly started poking around Apple and that imaginary October 19, 2001 board meeting that voted Steve Jobs options on 7.5...

Microsoft & Teradata to work together.
January 29, 2007... Microsoft and Teradata, the data warehouser that NCR is going to spin out this year, say they're going to optimize the interoperability between Microsoft's business intelligence widgetry and Teradata, starting with SQL Server Analysis Services,...

Microsoft to build online center in Texas.
January 29, 2007... Microsoft is going to build a $500 million data center in San Antonio, Texas for its online services like Windows Live. The 400,000-square-foot facility is supposed to house tens of thousands of servers and employ 75 people once construction is...

EnterpriseDB to sell generic Postgres support.
January 29, 2007... EnterpriseDB, whose venture-backed Oracle-replacing open source Postgres-based database could really give Oracle a run for its money, has started selling generic Postgres technical support packages beginning at just under a thousand bucks per...

EC backs open source.
January 29, 2007... The European Commission has thrown its weight behind open source. An EC-commissioned study published last week on business deployments of open source in six European countries says that a cost savings in long-term cost of ownership would...

LG Electronics copies Apple's iPhone.
January 29, 2007... Apple watchers may get to see how Apple's notion of an iPhone will fly a bit earlier than they expected. LG Electronics says it has a button-less touch screen phone called the Prada that plays music and takes pictures that will be in...

IE7 bulks up.
January 29, 2007... Microsoft says upwards of 100 million people are now using Internet Explorer 7, making it the second-most ubiquitous browser after IE6. According to WebSideStory, which counts such things, 25% of American web visitors now use IE7.

Music folk still ticked off.
January 29, 2007... The value of online music sales doubled to roughly $2 billion last year, 10% of all sales, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), but it failed to make up for the drop in CD sales. The IFPI said it...

IBM to open SOA centers.
January 29, 2007... IBM says it's going to open SOA centers in both Dubai and La Gaude in France. Eight are planned worldwide. Customers, partners and universities are supposed to be advantaged.