ePostal News articles from January 2009

ePostal News archives from January 2009

British Government Aims To Sell Off Part of the Royal Mail.
January 12, 2009... In the name of saving universal service, the UK government is proposing to sell off a piece of the beleaguered Royal Mail to a foreign postal operator "with a proven record in transforming its business," expecting the controversial move to...

La Poste To Be Partly Privatized.
January 12, 2009... La Poste, France's state-owned post office, will be partially privatized but will only sell shares to public institutions, not the individual investor, according to French President Nicolas Sarkozy. "La Poste will change its status but will...

USPS Hanging by the Skin of its Teeth.
January 12, 2009... The next entity to go to Congress with a begging bowl looking for a bailout may be the United States Postal System. Rumor has it that its deficit this year could run anywhere from $5 billion to $9 billion. William Burris, president of...

An Post To Be MVNO.
January 12, 2009... An Post is going into the mobile business selling branded mobile services in post offices throughout Ireland. It's cut a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) deal with Vodafone Ireland to use Vodafone's network and technology for...

Court Rules Against German Minimum Wage.
January 12, 2009... Deutsche Post's competitors TNT and PIN got a special Christmas present. A German court decided that that cute minimum wage scheme Deutsche Post got enacted in Germany just for postal workers is illegal. TNT, especially, which doesn't pay...

FedEx Cuts Salaries To Save Jobs.
January 12, 2009... Complaining about "some of the worst economic conditions" in its 35-year history and expecting things to get worse globally, FedEx has cut the paychecks of ~35,000 of its people, hoping the measure, which only affects salaried folk, helps save...

USPS Beefs Up its RIBBS Web Site.
January 12, 2009... The USPS has enhanced its RIBBS web site - ribbs.usps.gov - in an attempt to help business mailers improve their address quality by standardizing, validating and updating their address data. The site now has site indices that are searchable...

Entrust To Offer Digital Certificates for Adobe CDS.
January 12, 2009... Entrust, the company that vouches for digital identities, is partnering with Adobe to offer special digital certificates for Adobe's Certified Document Services (CDS) starting early this year. John Landwehr, director of security solutions...

Bowe Bell + Howell Cuts OEM Deal with Data-Pac.
January 12, 2009... Bowe Bell + Howell (BBH) has signed a deal to integrate, sell and service Data-Pac's postage accounting software and postage metering equipment. The addition of the Data-Pac line is supposed to provide BBH customers with other...

Jersey Post Intros Tracking.
January 12, 2009... Jersey Post has introduced a worldwide online tracking service arranged by its J express arm, which has a five-year 250,000-pound deal with BT Global Services to supply and service the latest scanning widgetry. The new BT-supplied...

Deutsche Post CFO To Quit.
January 12, 2009... Deutsche Post chief financial officer John Allan, 60, has decided to retire on June 30, according to a statement issued by the company. Early last year Allan's contract was extended until the end of 2010. After his departure Allan, who was CEO...

Dell Reorgs, Tosses a Couple of Senior Execs.
January 12, 2009... On New Year's Eve, when folks in New York were bellying up to the bar to see out a really horrible year, Dell announced that it was reorganizing again in its search for an elixir for its sagging profits, depressed revenues, eroding market share...

GNU Sues Cisco.
January 12, 2009... The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has sued Cisco for copyright infringement. It says Cisco's Linksys division uses GNU code and won't honor the GPL 2 and LGPL 2 and 2.1 licenses that the GNU software's distributed under and give customers...

Currency Plays Havoc with Oracle's Numbers.
January 12, 2009... The strengthening dollar played havoc with Oracle's fiscal second quarter, which spanned the ugly months of September through November when the recession took hold. The company, which gets over half its business from overseas, earned close...

Zoho Claims To Crush Google's Python Hug.(Zoho Corp.)(Brief article)
January 12, 2009... Zoho says that web apps created using its Creator widgetry can be automatically turned into programs that will run on Google's Python-constricted App Engine. App Engine, remember, only supports code written in Python and a particular...

Dell/PAN System Goes Live.
January 12, 2009... Three quarters after cutting the OEM deal, Dell has started delivering PAN, Egenera's data center virtualization and management software, in North America. The Egenera widgetry has been parlayed into a factory-integrated, turnkey solution...

Well, Isn't Yahoo the Goody Two-Shoes.(Yahoo! Inc.)(Brief article)
January 12, 2009... Yahoo up and said that starting this month it will anonymize any personal user data stemming from searches, page views, ad views, page clicks and ad clicks in 90 days - a broader policy than anybody else's got although how effective the...

Google Pack Sidelines Firefox.
January 12, 2009... Google, which made Mozilla rich supporting Firefox because Google was its default search engine, has dropped the browser as the default in its so-called Google Pack software collection in favor of its own shiny new out-of-beta Chrome browser....

Sun Upgrades VirtualBox.
January 12, 2009... Sun has updated its free desktop virtualization software, xVM VirtualBox, to rev 2.1. The new cut is supposed to significantly improve graphics and network performance, configuration is supposed to be easier, and it supports the latest...

SAP Loses Bid To Limit Oracle Suit.
January 12, 2009... SAP has lost a bid to get out from under some of the charges Oracle made against it in that shrill billion-dollar suit Oracle filed when it discovered SAP support subsidiary TomorrowNow had downloaded a host of Oracle software and other...

Microsoft & NTT To Talk Clouds.
January 12, 2009... Teams from Microsoft and Nippon Telegraph and Telephone are going to sit down and talk about collaborating on services that integrate networks with applications. They want to integrate Microsoft applications with NTT's information and...

Sun Services Packages Up Solutions.
January 12, 2009... Sun's unsung Services unit, while not an EDS or IBM Global Services, is a $5.2 billion-a-year business and profitable, a word that rarely appears in the same sentence with Sun. Anyway, it's packaged up a trio of so-called go-to-market...

Adobe Gives Linux AIR Time.
January 12, 2009... Adobe's AIR for Linux, the runtime engine that supports rich Internet apps (RIAs), has caught up with its Windows and Mac siblings. The company has released AIR 1.5 for Linux, the first time the Linux desktop variant has made it as a...

Microsoft Documents its ODF Support.
January 12, 2009... Ah, the Christmas spirit of "peace on earth, goodwill to men" must have wafting over Redmond, Washington. Microsoft said Tuesday that to - wait, lemme quote - "help foster interoperability among office productivity applications," it's gone...

Red Hat Devises New Maintenance Service.(Red Hat Inc.)(Brief article)
January 12, 2009... Red Hat has started a new software maintenance service called Extended Update Support (EUS) that's supposed to save bigger customers money if they standardize on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux environment, like, say, RHEL 5.2, for up to 18 months,...

openSUSE Revved.
January 12, 2009... The openSUSE Project has hit release 11.1, the latest version of its free open source Linux distribution and the widgetry that the upcoming SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 will be based on. This time through there's a new license that...

Apple Has Folks Back Taking Its Pulse.(Apple Inc.)(Brief article)
January 12, 2009... After the curtain closes in January, Apple will be pulling out of the annual IDG-own Macworld that's been a touchstone for the Apple-fancying press and the company's fans. CEO Steve Jobs is not going to show up this time, leading to speculation...

Google Losing Trust.
January 12, 2009... Google has disappeared from the Top 20 list of companies trusted with privacy in TRUSTe's fifth annual survey. American Express came in first followed by eBay (2), IBM (3), HP (6), Apple (8), Intuit (12), Yahoo (14) and Facebook (15).

Virtual PC Projection.
January 12, 2009... Credit Suisse thinks the virtual PC market will be worth at least $1.5 billion by 2011, representing 25.6 million users or 5.7% of the professional desktop installed base.

Dell Finds Greenbacks in Going Green.(Dell Inc.)(Brief article)
January 12, 2009... Dell says it's changing the way it packs its desktops and laptops for shipping to save upwards of $8 million over the next four years. It will cut out about 20 million pounds of packaging material, roughly 10% of what it uses, saving about...

Swiss Post To Digitize Zurich Financial's Mail.(contract between Swiss Post International and Zurich Financial Services)
January 19, 2009... Swiss Post, which is going to pilot Earth Class Mail, the digital mail option, has gotten a multi-year contract from Zurich Financial Service Group, the paper-heavy insurance company, to deliver and manage some of its document processing...

Royal Mail Privatization Plan To Face Opposition.
January 19, 2009... Members of Parliament who oppose the UK government's plan to sell off a minority piece of the Royal Mail are expected to introduce a motion in the House of Commons this week seeking to derail the plan. The Labor government finds itself in the...

UK Post Office Launches Internet Buddy Guide.
January 19, 2009... The UK Post Office, which sells Internet access, has taken up Internet training to expand its universe. According to a poll Post Office Broadband had run up by Populus Ltd, 71% of the British people use time spent with friends or family, such...

Canada Post Ups Price of E-Commerce.
January 19, 2009... Canada Post has upped the price of postage, including the rates for the thick envelops widely used to ship Internet purchases, which have now doubled. Packages weighing between 200 and 500 grams will cost $5.50, up from $2.25. It will cost two...

Deutsche Post Lets Giant Contract to Telefonica.
January 19, 2009... Deutsche Post World Net has cut a five-year $475 million (350 million euros) pan-European telecoms services contract with Telefonica. The Spanish company, one of the biggest telecommunications companies in the world, is supposed to provide all...

FedEx Cuts its Marketing Budget.
January 19, 2009... FedEx, which has already canceled its pricey Super Bowl commercial, now says it's reined in its marketing budget by more than 25% this year, figuring it a waste in the current environment. It's cut "non-contractual" marketing events, according...

Head of UPS Package Ops Retires.
January 19, 2009... The head of UPS' US package operation Jim Winestock is going to retire next month. He will be succeeded by Myron Gray, currently the head of the company's regional operations in Canada and all of Latin America. Gray will join UPS' management...

Satyam's Books as Cooked as a Christmas Goose.
January 19, 2009... The books of Satyam Computer Services Ltd, India's fourth-largest outsourcer, are a tissue of lies - and have been for years - made up out of whole cloth by the company's founder and chairman Ramalinga Raju and his younger brother, its managing...

Windows 7 Hits Public Beta.
January 19, 2009... At the opening keynote of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, making his first appearance at the show in a slot that used to be reserved for Bill Gates, announced the widely anticipated, feature-complete beta of...

Dell Blight Sickens Ireland.(Dell Computer Corporation Ltd.)(Brief article)
January 19, 2009... Ireland has suffered through the British, the potato famine, mass migrations and now the latest blight - Dell, the country's biggest exporter, accounting for 5% of its gross domestic product, deciding to pull up stakes and transfer all its EMEA...

Things Turn Nasty at Lenovo.
January 19, 2009... Business at Lenovo, the world's fourth-largest PC supplier and the repository of IBM's old PC unit, went from bad to worse the second half of last year because of crippling demand reduction, even in China, its home market, robbing the company...

Intel Says its Q4 Stunk.
January 19, 2009... Intel said that its Q4 results, due out later this week, are gonna be lousy - which won't come as a surprise to anybody given all the warning signs; it was just a matter of how bad; now we know. Intel, a harbinger of how things are going...

'It's Not Cancer, It's a Hormone Imbalance': Jobs.
January 19, 2009... The reason Apple CEO Steve Jobs has been looking like a wraith is due to a mysterious new hormone imbalance that was hard to diagnose but now has been and Jobs expects to fatten up by summer. Jobs released a statement saying so hours ahead of...

EMC Buys SourceLabs Pieces for its Cloud Infrastructure.
January 19, 2009... For reasons it won't explain EMC has bought some of the assets of SourceLabs - what exactly it won't say - and hired some of its people - who exactly it won't comment on - for its opaque Cloud Infrastructure Business. That's the unit that'll be...

Even Google Makes Layoffs.
January 19, 2009... The AP, God bless it, was rooting around SEC filings and discovered one sent in by Google on December 15 but not filed electronically and after some difficulty finally managed to lay its hands on a paper copy only to be rewarded with the...

Itella Brags about iPost.(Brief article)
January 26, 2009... Itella has put some numbers behind its expanded iPost hybrid mail service. It says that 105 million iPost letters were sent all around Europe last year, most of them in Finland, where the service has been in use since the 1990s. Last year the...

Opposition to Royal Mail Sell-off Solidifies.
January 26, 2009... The British government is pushing ahead with its plans to sell a piece of the state-owned Royal Mail - under attack by competitors and the Internet - to a European postal operator, despite opposition from the prime minister's own party. The...

Certipost Leverages New VAT Regs.
January 26, 2009... Starting this April, small Belgian companies will be required to file their quarterly value-added tax (VAT) declarations electronically using Intervat, the government's online program. So De Post/La Poste has launched a campaign informing SMEs...

Kodak Buys BBH Scanner Division.
January 26, 2009... Eastman Kodak is going to buy B|we Bell + Howell's Chicago-based scanner division, which sells document scanners to value added resellers, systems integrators and end users worldwide, on undisclosed terms. BBH's portfolio of document scanners...

USPS Ups Shipping Rates.
January 26, 2009... The new, pricier, USPS shipping rates have kicked in. Its Express Mail, Priority Mail and parcel shipping both nationally and internationally are now 5% higher than they were last week. The cost of sending a letter remains the same until May,...

Ex-Deutsche Post Boss Reportedly Wriggles Off the Hook.
January 26, 2009... Former Deutsche Post CEO Klaus Zumwinkel is reportedly going to cop a plea and admit to tax evasion in return for a two-year suspended sentence, according to the German business paper Handelsblatt. He was supposed to go on trial this week for...

Goodmail Picks Up Another $4m.
January 26, 2009... Goodmail Systems, the creator of CertifiedEmail, the trusted e-mail, has gotten $4 million in funding from Omidyar Network as part of a $5 million second closing of a round led by Bessemer Venture Partners. The Omidyar check brings total...

DocuSign Keeps Pressuring the Courier Class.
January 26, 2009... DocuSign has extended its "When Overnight Is Absolutely Positively Far Too Expensive and Not Nearly Fast Enough" recruitment program through March 31. As a provider of on-demand electronic signature and electronic contract execution solutions,...

Google Launches Reseller Program for Google Apps.
January 26, 2009... It was resellers that made Microsoft great and so, following in those well-trod footsteps, Google says it's recruiting resellers to push its Google Apps to businesses of all sizes everywhere in the world, taking Microsoft on where it lives. So...

PC Growth Disappeared in Q4.
January 26, 2009... For the first time in six years - with the last five averaging 15% increases - worldwide PC shipments were down a marginal 0.4% in Q4 according to IDC, a faster decline than the researcher had anticipated. It had projected growth of 6.5%. In...

Salesforce.com Concocts a Service Cloud.
January 26, 2009... With its revenue growth projected to slow this year to half of what it was Salesforce.com, the CRM software-as-a-service pioneer, has come up with a new trick that adds a new revenue stream. It's rigged up a thing it calls a Service Cloud,...

Intel Hides Under the Bed on Q1 Guidance.
January 26, 2009... Intel, that industry bellwether, reported its fourth quarter and the results were no worse than it warned they'd be a few days before when it reduced its expectations for the second time. Unfortunately it doesn't appear there'll be any relief...

Ballmer May Find Bartz As Resistant as Yang.
January 26, 2009... "Let's give this company some friggin' breathing room. It's been too crazy - everybody on the outside deciding what Yahoo should do, shouldn't do, what's best for them. That's going to stop." With those immortal words Carol Bartz, an...

Jobs Takes Medical Leave.
January 26, 2009... Apple CEO Steve Jobs said in a company e-mail that he's going to take a medical leave of absence until June and that COO Tim Cook will take over day-to-day operations as interim CEO. The news has set off speculation that Jobs won't be coming...

Amazon Investment Lays Foundation for Spanning Clouds.
January 26, 2009... Two-year-old Engine Yard, the cloud start-up where Amazon has parked some investment money, is broadening the application-centric widgetry used to power its own proprietary cloud to - you guessed it - Amazon's EC2, its first step, it says, to...

Bull To Peddle Cassatt Cloud-Making Software.
January 26, 2009... Bull is going to push Cassatt widgetry - software from BEA co-founder Bill Coleman's start-up - to improve the effectiveness of data center infrastructures of large European organizations. It's going to hit on select lines of business, sectors...

COBOL Meets EC2.
January 26, 2009... Most code in the world is still COBOL. That being so, Micro Focus has enabled enterprise COBOL apps to run on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), expecting to save legatees millions of dollars as clouds become more and more popular as a...

Satyam Execs Arrested.
January 26, 2009... Ramalinga Raju, the founder and disgraced ex-chairman of Satyam Computer Services Ltd, India's fourth-largest outsourcer, who confessed to cooking the books, has been arrested, along with his younger brother, the company's managing director...

Adobe Creates a 'Sandbox in the Sky'.(Brief article)
January 26, 2009... Adobe has announced that it's made its long-standing LiveCycle ES software accessible through Amazon's Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3), figuring that this "sandbox in the sky" scheme will create more LiveCycle ES...

IBM Claims Advances at Microsoft's Expense.
January 26, 2009... IBM says that its Lotus Notes licenses are up five million to 145 million, "including purchases by many industry leaders exchanging Microsoft licenses for Lotus collaboration software." It cited Minolta, Toshiba, Bank of New York Mellon, Banco...

Dell Buys Microsoft Expertise.
January 26, 2009... Dell has acquired Allin Corporation's Microsoft-based IT consulting and software solutions business for $12 million in stock. The deal includes four offices in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, San Jose and Walnut Creek, California and about 100 Allin...